PhD Candidates on the Job Market

As a behavioral and mental health equity scholar, my program of research is guided by two interconnected objectives: (1) examine how behavioral and neural mechanisms, relational processes, and sociocultural contexts operate together to shape developmental trajectories of risk and resilience in behavioral and mental health, and (2) translate empirical evidence into strategies for prevention and intervention that promote behavioral and mental health among adolescents and young adults disproportionately affected by systemic inequality.

My interdisciplinary scholarship, which spans social work, developmental psychology, neuroscience, and data science, demonstrates my capacity to generate theoretically grounded and methodologically rigorous empirical evidence while ensuring its relevance to practice and policy. During my doctoral training, I have established this program of research, with first authorship on 10 of 26 peer-reviewed articles and three additional manuscripts in press or under review. For example, two articles I published in Social Work build on findings from my empirical studies in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience and Transcultural Psychiatry to develop integrative frameworks connecting empirical evidence with clinical practice. My work has been supported by a T32 Fellowship from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the Rackham Merit Fellowship, and additional funding from the University of Michigan School of Social Work, Department of Psychology, and Michigan Institute for Data & AI in Society.

Approach to My Scholarship. Guided by Bioecological Systems Theory (Bronfenbrenner, 2007) and the Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory (Spencer, 1995), I conceptualize development as unfolding through transactions among behavioral and neural mechanisms, relational processes, and sociocultural contexts within an interconnected system (Sameroff, 2010; Garcia Coll, 1996). This perspective is particularly important for understanding individuals who may experience both heightened vulnerability through the biological embedding of chronic stress and restricted access to adequate mental health care due to structural inequities. My work also considers how individuals display resilience by drawing on contextual resources to navigate these conditions. My scholarship therefore seeks to explain not only developmental risk but also how individuals and their contexts contribute to heterogeneous trajectories of resilience.

This perspective guides how I integrate neuroscience into my program of research. Developmental neuroscience has increasingly elucidated neural processes associated with behavioral and mental health, yet much of this work has developed within biomedical frameworks that can contribute to reductionist, deficit-oriented, or deterministic interpretations of neural differences. I respond to this tension by bringing a social work lens to the design, conduct, and interpretation of developmental neuroscience research. Specifically, I draw on strengths-based and phenomenologically informed approaches to interpret neural differences within relational and sociocultural contexts, recognizing that such differences may reflect adaptation and resilience alongside vulnerability. In doing so, I aim to generate neuroscientific evidence that is both scientifically rigorous and contextually relevant to behavioral and mental health practice and policy.

Overview of My Dissertation. My dissertation, Brain Development in Context: The Shaping of Risk and Resilience Across Adolescence and Young Adulthood in Lived Social Worlds, exemplifies this approach. It focuses on adolescence and young adulthood, developmental periods marked by rapid biological maturation and expanding social contexts during which longer-term trajectories of behavioral and mental health begin to emerge. I employ a multimodal, mixed-methods design integrating neuroimaging, self-report measures, advanced statistical modeling, and qualitative interviews to contextualize behavioral and neural mechanisms within lived experience. The secondary quantitative data span more than 20 years of contextual and behavioral information from approximately 4,000 participants, many with histories of adverse childhood experiences. These data include a predominantly low-income subsample of families of color with neuroimaging data from approximately 200 participants at age 15 and 400 at age 21. Complementing these longitudinal data, I collected primary qualitative data through 12 one-on-one interviews with young adults who share demographic characteristics with the quantitative sample. My clinical research and practice in Chicago and Detroit, including as a fully licensed clinical social worker, further ground my research in the strengths and challenges of the communities with whom I have worked.

My dissertation advances two interconnected areas of my scholarship:

1. Clarifying associations between promotive contextual factors and neural mechanisms that may support positive developmental outcomes. My first line of research examines how relational processes, particularly positive relationships, shape developmental trajectories of behavioral and mental health. I have led and collaborated on studies investigating these processes using advanced quantitative methods, including multigroup structural equation modeling, generalized additive modeling, and latent profile analysis. In my dissertation, supported by an NICHD T32 Fellowship that provided two years of training in developmental neuroscience, I showed that maternal closeness was associated with fewer depressive symptoms, better social functioning, and more efficient and robust organization of structural brain connectivity. A key contribution of this work is demonstrating how positive relationships may become biologically embedded and contribute to adaptive developmental outcomes among adolescents growing up in contexts of adversity. By examining neural processes associated with positive relationships, this work advances a strengths-based approach to developmental neuroscience that extends beyond a focus on deficits.

2. Contextualizing neural correlates of developmental risk within the broader conditions in which they emerge. My second line of research examines behavioral and mental health outcomes by integrating neural and behavioral evidence with phenomenological evidence. One dissertation study uses person-specific functional connectivity to examine whether the organization of reward-related neural systems in adolescence prospectively predicts substance use and substance use disorders in young adulthood. A complementary qualitative study draws on interviews with young adults residing in low-income communities in Detroit to examine cannabis use, the most common form of substance use in the sample, within the context of psychological distress, economic conditions, constrained access to mental health care, family and peer relationships, and the development of agency. Motivated in part by my clinical observations that young adults may use cannabis to self-manage depression and anxiety when access to mental health care is limited, the qualitative study provides a way to understand neural and behavioral findings alongside the lived contexts in which substance use occurs.

Future Directions. Building on my scholarship, I will continue to examine how behavioral and neural mechanisms unfold within relational processes and sociocultural contexts to shape developmental trajectories of risk and resilience in behavioral and mental health. My next step is to move further upstream to examine how structural conditions organize these developmental contexts and become biologically and behaviorally embedded over time. I will focus particularly on environmental exposures and economic policies that shape access to resources and opportunities relevant to internalizing symptoms and substance use. I will investigate the behavioral and neural mechanisms through which these conditions become developmentally consequential, with the goal of identifying potential targets for practice and policy. Across these areas, I will leverage multimodal and mixed-methods approaches while maintaining strengths-based and phenomenologically informed perspectives. As this program develops, I will strengthen the bridge between knowledge generation and translation through collaborations with community partners, practitioners, policymakers, and intervention and implementation scientists to inform strategies across individual, relational, and structural levels. I will pursue NIH career development and independent investigator awards, alongside private foundation funding, to support this program of research.

Collectively, my research program positions social work not simply as a field to which developmental and neuroscientific findings can be translated, but as an intellectual foundation that shapes the questions I ask, the methods I use, and the conclusions I draw about human development. By integrating developmental science, neuroscience, and data science with a social work lens grounded in a strengths-based person-in-environment approach that honors lived experience, I aim to generate knowledge that strengthens behavioral and mental health practice and policy for populations disproportionately affected by systemic inequality.

As an interdisciplinary social work scholar, my research agenda is unified by an interest in how economic insecurity is experienced by disadvantaged communities, its effects, and how policy can play a role in alleviating social problems. Bridging scholarship on poverty & inequality, financial well-being, health & aging, medicine, science & technology, and social welfare policy, my research exemplifies the importance of meeting the Grand Challenge goal of reducing extreme economic inequality.

Emerging Economic Coping Strategies Amidst Rising Economic Insecurity— I was drawn to studying the market for human blood plasma by my interest in how people in the U.S. cope with financial precarity. While journalists and poverty scholars offer anecdotal accounts of people relying on earnings from plasma donation to mitigate financial hardship, empirical studies have not examined this phenomenon. Unlike in most countries, Americans can earn hundreds of dollars each month by giving blood plasma up to twice per week at for-profit plasma collection centers. While for-profit plasma centers have existed in the United States for decades, blood plasma collections have been on the rise since the Great Recession. Ten million plasma collections in 2005 jumped to 53 million collections in 2019. In this context, my research focuses on paid plasma donation as an economic coping strategy.

In a pre-dissertation project, I was lead author of a paper that uses spatial regression analysis to examine the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of the communities in which for-profit plasma collection centers situate. In the absence of data on donor characteristics (donor data is proprietary), the aim of this study was to better understand the communities in which blood plasma donors reside. I built an original data set that joined the addresses of 629 FDA licensed for-profit plasma collection centers (as of May 2017) with census-tract level data from the American Community Survey (ACS) 2011-2015 (5-year estimates). We used logistic regression to compare the characteristics of census tracts with and without plasma centers. Published in the Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare in 2021, our paper revealed that plasma centers were overrepresented in high poverty, urban communities where racial/ethnic minorities reside. While findings suggested that paid plasma donation serves as an economic coping strategy for poor Americans, a limitation of this study was that it did not rely on the accounts of actual donors.

My dissertation, Blood Veins for Hire: Social Inequality and the Growing Market for Human Blood Plasma, expands on my prior research and examines the proliferation of the blood plasma industry over time, including how the expansion of this industry is linked to economic insecurity. This work contends with how people leverage their bodies as an income-generating tool amidst rising economic insecurity. In doing so, my work grapples with how advancements in biotechnology that promise to ameliorate health conditions associated with longevity and aging can also perpetuate social inequality. Uncovering how technological innovation can exacerbate existing inequalities and create new ones is a necessary step to advancing policies that protect the health and well-being of disadvantaged populations throughout the life course. My research has been funded by the Federal Reserve of Boston, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the University of Michigan Rackham Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, and Poverty Solutions, among others.

While paid plasma donation has existed in the U.S. for decades, the practice has a fraught history. During the 1960s-90s, centers tended to be situated in skid rows, inside prisons, and along the US-Mexico border. As such, the practice came to be associated with low-income men (particularly blacks and Latinos), including alcoholics, drug abusers, and the homeless. The industry’s reliance on high-risk populations to procure blood plasma resulted in the tainted blood scandal of the 1980’s-90’s, a global tragedy that led to tens of thousands of patients contracting HIV and/or Hepatitis from contaminated blood products. The scandal further stigmatized the practice of paid blood plasma donation and the industry associated with it. Yet, biotechnological innovation in the 21st century expanded therapeutic uses of human blood plasma and transformed the industry. With population aging, advancements in the blood plasma therapeutics sector offer immense potential in treating a range of complex chronic diseases. Consequently, demand for plasma derived medicines has skyrocketed. The blood plasma industry has expanded blood plasma collections in the US, the nation with the least restrictive plasma collection regulations in the world, and where over 70% of the world’s blood plasma is procured. As investment in research and development of blood plasma products accelerates, a key detail that is often overlooked is that production of these therapeutics hinges on procuring millions of liters of human blood plasma.

This mixed methods study examines donors’ experiences and their rationales for becoming paid plasma donors, as well as the geographic expansion of plasma centers throughout the US. I collected 300 survey responses and conducted 36 semi-structured interviews with paid plasma donors between September 2021 and February 2024. Analysis of this data provides insight on the structural factors that influence people's decisions to give plasma, how earnings are used, the side effects donors experience, how the process of giving plasma works, how the industry’s framing of plasma donation as a “donation” shapes the donor’s perception of the transaction, and the extent to which donors view plasma donation as a job. To complement these data, I created a dataset that joins demographic, social, and housing data from the ACS 2019-2023 (5-year estimates) with the addresses of over 1,200 active plasma centers (as of May 2026) to examine the characteristics of the locations into which plasma centers have expanded since May 2017. The number of centers has doubled since then.

Findings from my spatial analysis reveal that racial and ethnic minority populations (Black non-Hispanic, Hispanic alone, and other) as well as foreign born populations are overrepresented in census tracts with plasma centers. Moreover, centers are expanding into areas with higher median incomes. Survey respondents from households earning less than $10,000 per year (21.7% of respondents) to over $100,000 per year (20% of respondents) expressed that economic insecurity and/or the “bad economy,” characterized by inflation and the high cost of food, gas, rent, student debt, and other basic living expenses, motivated their decision to give plasma. Respondents often described aggregating the number of hours they spent at a plasma center and dividing it by the amount of compensation they received to calculate their “hourly wage”—rationalizing paid donation as form of work.

Donors often experience short-term side effects, such as blackouts and fatigue. They also worry that frequent plasma donation will carry long-term health consequences. Given the vital role blood plasma plays in the immune system, donors worry that frequent donation will make them more susceptibility to illness as they get older. Despite experiencing side effects, donors often continued giving blood plasma because they needed the money. This study reveals that expanded use of blood plasma donation as an economic coping strategy is indicative of a deeper set of social and economic issues in the U.S.—rising economic insecurity, the changing nature of work, and the decline of the middle class. I plan to publish several papers and a book based on my dissertation research.

As a social worker committed to equity and social justice, my findings advance social work research, practice, and policy by raising awareness of the ethical, societal, and health implications associated with people using plasma donation as an economic coping strategy amidst rising inequality, a shifting labor market, and an aging population. To amplify awareness in the public discourse and among policymakers, I have engaged in public scholarship. As a Visiting Fellow with the Boston Federal Reserve, I worked on a policy brief on how paid plasma donation was emerging as an economic coping strategy in the New England area, one of the wealthiest regions in the United States. In addition, widespread interest in my research on the blood plasma industry has allowed me to engage with various domestic and international media outlets. In 2022, I was featured in a digital media story titled “Why So Many Companies Want U.S. Plasma.” To date, the video has been viewed over 600,000 times. As an invited guest on the Bed of Lies: Blood podcast series produced by The Telegraph, I was able to reach the UK audience (2021). Through a live interview on Wisconsin Public Radio (2022), I reached an audience in a state where for-profit plasma centers are expanding rapidly. As an assistant professor, I will continue to engage in public scholarship and policy advocacy.

The Indirect Benefits of Safety Net Programs— In a collaborative project with Robert Manduca and Catalina Anampa Castro, we examine how safety net programs are distributed spatially and how they impact regional inequality. Published in Social Service Review and selected as a finalist for the Frank R. Breul Memorial Prize, awarded to the best article published in the journal each year, this paper uses county level data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) to examine how social transfer programs reduce regional income inequality. Based on measures of personal income transfers from programs such as the Earned Income tax Credit (EITC), the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and other income maintenance benefits, we create a measure for total income transfers and use simulations to see how much interregional inequality there would be if not for transfer programs and if the Child Tax credit of 2021 were expanded. We show that social transfers reduced interregional inequality in 2019 by 12 percent, equivalent to reversing 28.6 percent of the growth in pretransfer inequality since the 1970s. We argue that while safety net programs have the primary goal of reducing economic insecurity for different population groups, they have the indirect benefit of reducing geographic inequality—a benefit that is not always recognized, either in public discourse or in the cost-benefit analyses used to estimate the efficacy of the programs.

Expanding Critical Epistemologies in Social Work: Conceptualizing Benevolent Exploitation— I will contribute to the literature on critical social work by developing a theoretical paper that uses the case of the blood plasma industry to explore the concept of benevolent exploitation. This work applies a critical approach to understanding how corporations foster oppressive systems. Examination of the relationship between blood plasma donors and plasma centers reveals an interaction where a for-profit corporation leverages benevolence to justify and set industry norms. By exalting how the corporation contributes to social good, it limits opposition from affected parties, thus perpetuating inequality and intensifying exploitation. The plasma industry’s reference to the sale and collection of blood plasma as a donation—a charitable contribution rather than a financial exchange—is just one example. By framing the exchange as a donation, donors are less likely to dispute low compensation rates. In turn, the pharmaceutical industry has successfully lobbied the FDA to increase the volume of plasma extraction per donor per donation, while maintaining, or at times lowering, donor compensation rates. Donors have no choice but to succumb to new regulations or seek an alternative economic coping strategy. Paradoxically, benevolence is the mechanism that facilitates exploitation. This work contributes to critical epistemologies in social work and extends the discourse on exploitation.

As an interdisciplinary scholar, I look forward to continuing to develop a research agenda that contends with emerging issues at the intersection of poverty & inequality, health & aging, medicine, science & technology, social welfare policy, and critical social work.

My program of research focuses on understanding multiple forms of interpersonal violence and their correlates, outcomes, prevention, and treatment. My substantive training is in intimate partner violence (IPV) and sexual violence (SV) research, with a focus on demographic correlates and mental health outcomes of violence victimization. I have also expanded my research focus to include military violence and its effects on servicemembers, veterans, and civilians. As a doctoral candidate in the University of Michigan’s Joint PhD Program in Social Work and Clinical Psychology, I draw on interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches. Together with my practice experience at Domestic Violence Intervention Services, Inc. and the Restorative Justice Institute of Oklahoma, these perspectives help deepen my understanding of different forms of violence. The ultimate goal of my research program is to develop cross-cutting strategies to prevent violence and treat its consequences through the application of restorative justice and critical feminist principles to veteran and civilian mental health interventions around IPV, SV, and military violence.

During my doctoral studies, I established a strong foundation in quantitative IPV and SV survey-based research to identify differential patterns of violence vulnerability and document unmet survivor needs. I published five peer-reviewed manuscripts on these topics, three of which were first-authored, and have one second-authored manuscript under review. This work included a first-authored scoping review of research on SV on college campuses with a focus on racial/ethnic, sexual, and gender minority student experiences (Shyrokonis et al., 2025). Results showed an increased risk of SV victimization among cisgender women and sexual and gender minority students, as well as a lack of standardization in sampling procedures and survey measures and a dearth of research on SV perpetration. To build on these findings, I plan to develop and test standardized campus SV measures that use evidence-based SV self-report items as well as community-supported understandings of intersectional identity.

Additionally, I led two papers focused on documenting violence survivors’ experiences with legal and social service systems in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. I analyzed data from a statewide survey administered to Michigan IPV survivors in June-August 2020 to examine IPV survivors’ formal and informal service utilization, and found that many survivors were unable to access formal services due to pandemic lockdowns (Shyrokonis et al., 2024). Through logistic regression analyses, we discovered that married and Asian and Pacific Islander (API) respondents were the least likely to seek either formal or informal help. Using the same survey data, I examined IPV survivors’ experiences with decarcerated (ex-)partners, and found that decarceration during the pandemic successfully targeted individuals who went on to help and not harm their (ex-)partners and/or families. However, nearly half of respondents were not notified of their partner’s release, and about one-third of respondents experienced harm from a decarcerated partner (Shyrokonis et al., 2022). I would love to build on this work through future research to understand potential drivers of these discrepancies and strategies for their reduction, as well as to develop everyday and public health emergency protocols that better attend both to the safety of IPV survivors and the rehabilitation of in/decarcerated individuals.

In addition to my work on IPV and SV, my substantive area of research also includes military and war-related violence. As a first-generation Ukrainian immigrant, my interest in this area developed as a result of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the impact it had on my extended family, including multiple family members whom I helped to evacuate from Ukraine. This experience led me to apply my expertise in IPV toward studying the impacts of wartime violence and its drivers, manifestations, and effects on servicemembers, veterans, and civilians. I contributed to a structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis of a survey of Ukrainian college students that found that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) predicted subsequent IPV victimization and PTSD, and that this relationship was partially mediated by other lifetime traumatic events (Burlaka et al., 2025). Given the context of ongoing armed conflict in Ukraine, these findings stress the importance of addressing the impact of ACEs and IPV on individuals’ mental health alongside war-related trauma. I am very interested in future research that develops, tests, and implements such programming.

Although IPV and SV are generally studied by disparate researchers and social scientific areas than military violence, in practice these experiences often co-occur and build on one another. Not only can individuals experience multiple forms of violence throughout the life course, but vulnerability to multiple types of violence is also differentially related to intersectional social positionalities. As such, I believe that focusing my research on IPV, SV, and military violence in concert will lead to key insights and a fuller picture of human experiences of violence victimization, perpetration, rehabilitation, and healing. One way I bridge the gaps between these areas of study is through overarching frameworks such as critical feminist theory, which attends to how oppression based in intersectional sexual, gender, racial/ethnic, and other identity elements influences who perpetrates what violence toward whom, how cultural and structural contexts perpetuate that violence, and how that violence may be denormalized and reduced.

My dissertation research uses a critical military research framework, which integrates critical feminist and postcolonial thought to understand the functions of imperialism, white supremacy, and other interconnected oppressions in military norms, institutions, and engagements, as well as the pervasive role of militarism in diverse aspects of everyday life. My dissertation centers around the construct of moral injury, which refers to the shame, guilt, and other psychological outcomes of experiencing or perpetrating behavior that violates one’s deeply held moral beliefs. I am utilizing data from the Army Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Servicemembers (Army STARRS), a nationally representative sample of United States military servicemembers and veterans, to investigate the relationship between combat experiences, moral injury, and mental health outcomes using a longitudinal SEM approach. This work will contribute to knowledge about the moral aspects of how servicemembers make sense of their participation in military violence and how this contributes to mental health symptomatology. I hope for my dissertation findings and subsequent work to inform the development of veteran moral injury treatment that improves mental health while honoring individuals’ moral processing and helping to situate their experiences within larger organizational, political, and cultural contexts.

Building on my dissertation work, as an early-stage faculty member, I plan to continue studying war-related moral injury in military, veteran, and civilian populations. I have begun a second study using the Army STARRS in which I am examining the relationship between moral injury and military turnover. I am also utilizing The Veterans Metrics Initiative Transitioning Veterans Survey (TVMI TVS) to examine the relationship between military sexual violence and harassment and moral injury. Further, I am collaborating on a qualitative research project focused on the experiences of Russian migrants living in Azerbaijan that relate to moral injury and political refusal. Our team used a hybrid inductive-deductive thematic coding approach to analyze this qualitative data and I am currently coauthoring a manuscript reporting our findings, which include poignant participant descriptions of the role of moral processing and political refusal in decisions to migrate (Gonzalez Benson et al., 2026). I plan to leverage both my quantitative and qualitative methodological and analytical skills to advance the field’s understanding of war-related moral injury, contributing to theoretical and demographic knowledge about this topic and strengthening prevention and intervention targets and approaches.

I have a proven track record of obtaining funding to support my research agenda and academic pursuits. I have obtained 12 internal awards, five of them research awards, altogether totaling $44,770. As an early-career faculty, I will continue this trajectory by seeking both internal and external funding for my research. I plan to first seek internal pilot funds to gather pilot data and then use the results thereof as preliminary data in support of larger state or federal funding opportunities such as the National Institute of Mental Health Exploratory/Developmental Research Project Grant (parent R21). I am also excited about leveraging potential partnerships with university and community-based veteran, IPV, and SV prevention and intervention initiatives that share my goal of violence prevention and treatment.