I am a Ph.D. candidate in Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and I am studying emergency response teams and organizational training.

My dissertation project is a qualitative study of the effects of organizational training on improvising among emergency response teams. Based on propositions in my previous work, I am collecting and analyzing narratives from emergency medical professionals, law enforcement, and first responders in Austin, Texas and the San Francisco Bay Area. The purpose of this project is to understand how emergency workers balance standardized and informal organizational training with the need to improvise due to the unpredictability of their work. I plan to defend my dissertation in the first few months of 2012.