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.

Currently, I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. I hold a PhD in Political Science from MIT where I was a member of the Security Studies Program. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the SaxeLab, a social cognitive neuroscience lab at MIT.

My current projects focus on: (1) threat perception; (2) political information processing; and (3) working with text. I am also generally interested in interdisciplinary perspectives on the study of conflict and security. I use a variety of data sources and analytical approaches in my work, including archival research, observational and experimental studies, machine learning tools, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

My work has been published or is forthcoming in International Security, International Organization, PNAS Nexus, Cerebral Cortex, and Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences.