She holds a 2005 Ph.D. in Human Development with a specialization in Educational Psychology and a Certiﬁcate in Educational Measurement & Statistics from the University of Maryland College Park. She received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Her research focuses on cognitive and motivational predictors of STEM achievement and retention, as well as predictors of reading comprehension. She has conducted classroom-based intervention and basic processes research, longitudinal, and multi-method studies. She has developed numerous assessments and has used a range of statistical methods in published research. She teaches introductory and intermediate statistics and growth curve modeling. She sits on the editorial boards of several prominent journals in psychology and has served on review panels for NSF and IES.