CURRENT AFFILIATIONS

I am Assistant Research Professor in the Interdisciplinary Data Science Program and the Department of Political Science at Duke University. I am the Co-Director of the Social Science Scholars Program (SoSci Scholars) which helps support undergraduate research in the social and behavioral disciplines at Duke.

From 2019-2025, I was Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) in the Department of Political Science at Duke. I chose to leave the tenure track to cultivate more work-life balance, while still pursuing the academic work that I love. There’s no juicy backstory—just a choice that made sense for me. I’m happy to discuss it if you’d like to know more.

I study how elites respond when economic arrangements and institutions change—and how those responses shape who retains power. My research spans the Industrial Revolution in Britain, the enfranchisement of minority groups in the United States, and contemporary election administration. Across these settings, I’m interested in how political and economic change can transform some arrangements of power while leaving others remarkably durable.

I’m also interested in the practice of social science itself. What does it mean to explain how something happens? And how do our expectations and sense of what makes a compelling finding shape the knowledge we produce? These questions anchor my work on mechanisms, meaning, and values in scientific practice. Across my research projects, my methods range from archival research and historical analysis to quantitative and computational tools, including natural language processing and machine vision.

Before coming to Duke, I was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University. I received my PhD in Political Science from Stanford University in 2017. I also hold an MA in Economics from Stanford University, and BAs in both Economics and Latin American Studies and a minor in Mathematics from New York University. After completing my undergraduate degrees, I spent three years as a Research Assistant at the Brookings Institute in Washington, DC where I worked on topics in financial, transportation, and telecommunications regulation.

I was born and raised in Seattle, Washington.