Creative thinking across contexts.
I'm a first-year PhD student in organizational behavior at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Gies College of Business
KRCreate · Carry · Contribute
Sustaining
creativity
creativity
Motivating questions
I study how people learn to see problems differently, how creative ways of thinking carry across work and nonwork life, and how these reciprocal processes shape flourishing, relationships, and contributions to others.
Creative thinking involves generating personally novel representations that open up new possibilities for action.
How does creative thinking transfer into well-being across life domains?
How can creative thinking be directed toward other people's needs?
One core idea. Three dimensions.
Create, Carry, and Contribute are not three separate projects. Most of what I want to know sits in the places where they overlap.
CreateCarryContribute
Transferwork and nonwork
Directiontoward whose needs
Reciprocitybenefits or costs
Flourishingthe open question
- Transfer
- Create and Carry: work and nonwork
- Direction
- Create and Contribute: toward whose needs
- Reciprocity
- Carry and Contribute: benefits or costs
- Flourishing
- All three: the open question
Scroll to assemble the agenda
Why it matters for organizations
Organizations, institutions, and individuals face challenges that cannot always be addressed by applying what has worked before. We may need to reconsider how we understand those challenges, view them from different angles, imagine possibilities beyond what already exists, and act in new ways.
If we understand how creativity, well-being, and prosociality shape one another, organizations can support creative work in a way that sustains employees' well-being, which matters to both the person and the organization. They can also help direct that creativity toward better solutions and, over time, better organizations.
Research implicationsWork so far
Recent presentations
Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Annual Conference · New Orleans, LA, United States
2026April
Symposium
When inclusive leadership backfires: Incivility and LGBTQ+ worker belonging
2026April
Poster
Networked trust: Simulating idea theft, leadership, and creativity
2026April
Symposium
Effective communication in a globally distributed team: An agent-based model
Selected by the SIOP Program Committee from among top-rated proposals for inclusion in the Groups/Teams Content Area Theme Track.