I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University and Graduate Student Associate at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. In the fall of 2018, I will join the Brown University Department of Political Science and Watson Institute for International Affairs as an assistant professor. 

My research focuses on international security and Chinese foreign policy, with a particular interest on the design of institutions responsible for national security decision-making. My dissertation offers a theory of the origins and consequences of national security institutional design, coupling original cross-national time series data with new archival and interview data from China, Taiwan, India and Pakistan. Other research projects utilize qualitative, statistical and experimental methods to address theoretical puzzles regarding the politics of national leaders, elite advisers and cyber security in a variety of regional contexts.

My research has been supported by the Smith Richardson Foundation, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Institute for Strategic and Conflict Studies at George Washington University, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

I am the co-organizer (with Josh Kertzer) of the first Harvard International Security Conference.

Previously, I served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army, with assignments to Afghanistan, U.S. Cyber Command and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Some of my writing has been published by War on the Rocks and Center for a New American Security.

​I am also an Ironman triathlete, marathon runner and avid enthusiast of musicals by Stephen Sondheim. I live in Cambridge with my dog, Cosette, and fiancée.

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Image: People's Liberation Army soldier in Tiananmen Square, Beijing - 2005