Her research connects cultural understandings and behavioral outcomes during the transition to adulthood in sub-Saharan Africa. She employs a variety of data sources and methodological approaches, including in-depth interviews, classroom observations, computational text analysis, and sequence analysis. Her research has been published in the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, and Population and Development Review. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard for two years before joining the faculty at Princeton.