Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor at Loyola University Maryland. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at the Program on Ethics, Politics, & Economics at Yale University. I received my Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences from Columbia University as a la Caixa Graduate Fellow. 

My interests are wide-ranging and interdisciplinary. They include political elites, colonial investments and legacies, education, and culture. My work focuses on East and West African countries and on the Global South more generally. It has been published or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Historical Political Economy, Journal of Modern African Studies, Journal of Politics, Public Choice, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Studies in Comparative International Development, World Development and World Politics.

My book project shows that education and competence are fundamental to understand who sits in African governments. This is in contrast to dominant explanations, which have focused on ethnic demography, conflict, and money in politics. I complement direct evidence from interviews in Senegal and Uganda with an original spatial dataset containing information on thousands of cabinet ministers since 1960.

Prior to receiving my PhD, I worked as a consultant for Princeton's Innovations for Successful Societies in Mexico and for the World Bank in Poverty Reduction and Economic Management.