My Journey and Vision

My educational path began at Butte College, where I earned an Associate of Arts in Liberal Arts, and continued at California State University, Chico, where I completed both a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and a Master of Arts in Social Science. I later earned my PhD in Sociology from Kansas State University, where my dissertation, Educational Attainment of Second-generation Hmong Immigrants in a Rural Ethnic Enclave, examined education, migration, ethnicity, and community life. This educational background continues to shape my work as a sociologist, teacher, and public scholar whose interests center on inequality, community resilience, social policy, and lived experience.

I have taught sociology since 2002 and have been a lecturer at California State University, Chico since 2005, teaching across both on-campus and online modalities. My courses include Introduction to Sociology, Food Justice, Global Problems, Sociology of Natural Disasters, Sociology of Human Stress, Population and Migration, Ethnicity and Nationalism, Wealth and Inequality, Women, Work, and Family,  and Introduction to the Asian American Experience. Across my teaching, I invite students to connect sociological concepts to the urgent issues shaping their lives and communities, including disaster, inequality, food insecurity, migration, stress, gender, work, family, and social change. My teaching is grounded in accessibility, public sociology, and the belief that students learn best when they can see the relevance of sociology in everyday life.

I’ve also spent a lot of time in the wonderful, weird, and occasionally exhausting world of Academic Senate. I’ve been a Senator, Vice Chair, Chair, and Immediate Past Chair at Chico State. In 2025–2026 I served as a Lecturer Senator for the Academic Senate of the California State University, the systemwide faculty body that represents CSU faculty on issues that affect the whole system. That means I’ve sat in a lot of meetings, read a lot of policies, built a lot of agendas, and learned how many people it takes to keep a university moving. I also now know just enough Robert’s Rules of Order to be useful, dangerous, and occasionally annoying. 

This work has given me a front-row seat to how higher education actually works—budgets, enrollment, campus safety, online education, committees, personalities, emergencies, and all. Mostly, it has taught me that universities run on relationships, patience, shared purpose, and the people willing to do the unglamorous work behind the scenes.