She earned her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. Her primary research interests are in urban social inequality and crime; juvenile justice; corrections; desistance and prisoner reentry; life course sociology and criminology, especially transitions to adulthood, and qualitative research methods. Her book, Falling Back: Incarceration and Transitions to Adulthood among Urban Youth (Rutgers University Press, 2013) employed ethnographic research to document the experience of incarceration, reentry, and navigating adulthood for 15 young men of color in Philadelphia. More recently, she has written about street-level drug selling in Philadelphia.