I graduated cum laude from The University of Texas-Austin with a B.A. in Plan II Liberal Arts Honors and French. An interest in education led to active roles in the Blanton Museum of Art and the Harry Ransom Center at UT. My interest in research stems from experiences in the public health field. In high school I volunteered at Texas Children’s Hospital and in college I worked as a TCH research assistant on the Immunization Recall Project, which seeks to improve child vaccination rates. After college I interned at Blueprint Partners, a consulting firm in Brussels that specializes in lobbying the European Parliament.  

My current research focuses on politics in the developing world, including issues related to nation-building and development, citizenship and ethnicity, and political violence. My research has been supported by several grants, including a Dean’s Fellowship and a Graduate Summer Research Fellowship through the University of Maryland. I have done two rounds of fieldwork in West Africa; the first was in Ghana during Summer 2013 and the second was in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire during Winter 2014. I conducted interviews and ran a survey-based experiment in Abidjan and Accra. I look forward to going to Nairobi, Kenya in Summer 2015 for the American Political Science Association's Africa Workshop. 

Experiences in the field inform the course I teach about politics in developing countries at the University of Maryland. In 2013 I won a Distinguished Teaching Award for my work as a teaching assistant the preceding year.