Welcome!
I am an Assistant Teaching Professor and Graduate Program Director at the School of Criminal Justice, Forensic Science, and Security at the University of Southern Mississippi at Hattiesburg. In addition, I am a forensic counselor with extensive training in trauma assessment, treatment, and supervision. My research explores decision-making processes in the psycho-legal context, and I am passionate about mentoring and developing student-scientists and clinicians.
My Research
My research integrates perspectives from criminology, psychology, law, and public policy. I use administrative data sets and experimental designs to answer questions about decision-making in the legal system, with specific focus on highly-stigmatized individuals (e.g., those labeled with mental illness) and crimes (e.g., those accused of sexual crimes). I am particularly interested in exploring the interaction between individual predictors of legal system involvement, decisions made by the accused in the legal process, and systemic pressures in creating an ever-escalating cycle of violence and criminal legal system involvement.
Choose-Your-Own-Adventure (CYOA) Experiments
Some of the most interesting questions at the intersection of forensic psychology and decision-making relate to decisions made by the accused. Why do people commit crimes in the first place? Why do innocent people confess, or why do they plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit? And relatedly, why do professionals within the legal system allow (and sometimes, encourage) these seemingly unjust decisions? These, and related questions have garnered a great deal of research interest. Yet they are often studied as distinct decision points, with limited recognition of the dynamic process within which they may occur - a process that often imposes its' own pressures and involves a host of prior decisions and conditions, all of which can narrow the (perceived or real) options available to the decision-maker. However, studying the process is challenging because of the inherent limitations of paradigms used to study decisions made by the accused, most of which only allow one decision-point to be measured. I adapted CYOA, a branching narrative commonly used in young adult fiction, to offer a systematic way for researchers to measure sequences of conditions and decisions. The CYOA paradigm enables participants to play an active role through the entire adjudication process, making multiple decisions throughout the process, as they would in the real world.
Teaching Approach + Experience
I've been teaching since 2016, and have taught courses at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Southern New Hampshire University, Merrimack College, and Clark University. My background offers the unique experience of teaching in three different disciplines (Psychology, Criminal Justice, and Sociology), across all three levels of academic instruction (from first-year undergraduates to Ph.D. students), both online and on campus.
At Southern Miss, I regularly teach Ethics (CJ-482) and Intro to Juvenile Justice (CJ-360), but have taught a wide variety of other courses as well. As an instructor, I'm particularly passionate about creating applied learning environments, building critical thinking skills, and using Universal Design principles to develop accessible classrooms. In addition, I love mentoring students, with a focus on research training and career preparation.
Featured Course: Fall 2024 Honors Seminar
"Decisions, Decisions..."
Every aspect of our lives is shaped by the decisions we make. From our everyday lunch food choices (and their effect on our waistlines), to the decision to commit a crime (or worse, confess to a crime you didn’t commit), each decision has the potential to affect our futures. Yet decision making research from fields as diverse as public health, criminal justice, and economics highlights a fundamental human problem: our decisions are often irrational, contrary to our own self-interest, or driven by flawed assumptions, impulses, and mental shortcuts. In this honors seminar, we’ll uncover key phenomena, theories, and concepts involved in decisions in different contexts, and experience the basics of experimental research methodology by replicating famous decision-making experiments.
