She received a Ph.D. in public administration from Indiana University-Bloomington in 2009 and a BA in economics from University of Texas-Austin. Before joining the DPPA, she was an emerging scholar in Urban Institute, Washington D.C., a summer fellow in the RGK Center on Philanthropy, University of Texas in Austin, and a visiting scholar at Peking University. Her primary research interests are in inter-organizational networks, social service provision, collaborative governance, crowdsourcing adaptation, and nonprofit management.