Dr. Yingling is an Associate Professor of Social Work at the University of Louisville. For more than twenty years her work has focused on autism services, and she has authored or co-authored more than twenty-five peer-reviewed articles. Her primary goal has been to maximize access to health services for children with autism by conducting research that has concrete and actionable practice and policy implications. She is co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Research Methods and Methodologies in Social and Behavioral Sciences. Along with co-author Charlton W. Yingling, she is writing the book Statusquotastrophe, which is in progress and under contract.

She utilizes mostly advanced quantitative methods and numerous secondary data sources, including government, nonprofit, and survey sources, to explore child, family, and contextual factors that influence access to and utilization of services (e.g., age of diagnosis, utilization of home-based and clinic-based services, provider accessibility). In many of her studies, she has been the first to integrate data sources required to answer important research questions on accessibility. Recently, she led a study examining geographic access to providers of applied behavior analysis services across the United States. This work has identified counties with insufficient provider accessibility and the characteristics of areas most in need of providers. Currently, Dr. Yingling is examining network adequacy of autism services providers in the Affordable Care Act and commericial markets as well as supporting community-based researchers to explore how behavior analysts determine medical necessity for their patients. Necessarily, this work is multidisciplinary and spans the fields of social work, pediatrics, health services, behavior analysis, and public health. Dr. Yingling is fortunate to collaborate with excellent researchers, practitioners, parents, and national leaders in the field who make this work possible.

She is also leveraging her expertise to investigate the social and environmental implications of human ambitions in space. In 2023, she published an article in the International Journal of Social Welfare that outlined the need for the profession of social work to expand its definition of environment to include outer space. Along with co-investigator Charlton W. Yingling, she is completing a mixed method study on public perceptions of ongoing developments in space, such as space tourism, NASA's Artemis program, and property rights on the Moon, among other topics. In May 2026 they presented early findings from this work at the In-hospitable Space Conference at Carnegie Mellon, sponsored by the Society for Social and Conceptual Issues in Astrobiology and the European Astrobiology Institute. To enhance public engagement, they co-wrote a companion essay for the Pittsburgh Review of Books.