She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the Michigan State University in 2004. Prior to joining Texas A&M University in 2007, she worked as a consultant economist in the Development Research Group at the World Bank. Her research is in applied development microeconomics. She has worked on such topics as rural-to-urban migration, consumption smoothing, population aging and elderly health, gender disparity, and public goods and poverty reduction. Her work has been published in Demography, Economics and Human Biology, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Food Policy, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Development Studies, Journal of Public Economics and Labour Economics.