Welcome! I am a social scientist with a long-standing interest in the human brain. My research is broadly concerned with the effects of cognitive processes - including perception, attention, concept formation, and memory - on political behavior writ large.
Currently, I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Most recently, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in SaxeLab, a social cognitive neuroscience lab at MIT. In 2018, I completed my PhD in Political Science at MIT where I was a member of the Security Studies Program.
My primary research project investigates the ways in which the psychological and neurological underpinnings of threat perception influence policy preferences. I am also generally interested in interdisciplinary perspectives on the study of conflict and security. I look to bridge the social and cognitive sciences using a variety of data sources and analytical approaches, including archival research, observational and experimental studies, machine learning tools, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
In Current Opinion in Behavioral Science, I describe the ways in which tools from neuroscience and developmental psychology can help us better understand political preferences (un-gated version, with Rebecca Saxe).
Photo by Aidan Milliff