As a public and community health professional, she believes in being highly connected and involved in the community. This allows her to be an agent of change to create a better, safer, and healthier community for all. She earned her doctorate in Community Health, Specialization in Disability Studies, minor in Gender and Women's Studies from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests are diverse spanning Disability Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies, and include accessibility, the intersections of abuse, disability, and health, parental rights of people with disabilities, and policy research. Her overall research objective is to improve the rights and lives of people with disabilities.