research
IN PROGRESS
Dissertation:
By Design: Institutions during Drought & Conflict.
Defended & passed April 2025.
Project Overview: Quantitative analysis investigating how institutions condition violent interstate & interstate conflict under drought using the AfroGrid dataset and the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database (TFDD).
Data & Methods: Building, cleaning, and merging large-scale spatial-temporal datasets by integrating geospatial data from AfroGrid with institutional variables from the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database (TFDD). Applying advanced quantitative modeling — including Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE), survival analyses, spatial error, and spatial lag regressions—to track how institutional mechanism patterns (and norm diffusion) influence conflict outcomes across transboundary river basins.
Additional Work:
Another Russia: Elite group attitudes as signals of divergence in autocratic politics.
Author:
Project Overview: Quantitative longitudinal analysis of shifting Russian elite group attitudes of the Ukraine, NATO, & EU.
Data & Methods: Managed, cleaned, and modeled complex survey data using the Survey of Russian Elites (SRE) dataset. Developed predictive and parametric statistical models to identify latent shifts and signal divergence in high-stakes political environments.
Project Presentation & Conference Selection: 2023, 2024
From the Other Side of the Border: Mexican Public Attitudes of American Politics.
Co-authors: Sergio Wals & Kianna Moore
Project Overview: Early stages of quantitative analysis & drafting manuscripts (in English & Spanish). We ask if – and how – Mexican partisanship and institutions longitudinally frame public attitudes (e.g., immigration) as American presidents are elected.
Data & Methods: Five nationally representative surveys of Mexican public opinions from 2003-2024.
Nebraska Water Allocation Legislation: Narrative Policy Framework Analyses, 1971-2023.
Co-authors: Sarah Michaels & Taylor Gold
Project Overview: Seeking to trace how historical political narratives about water allocation in NE affected legislative outcomes.
Data & Methods: Overseeing end-to-end data collection, combining qualitative text analysis with structured quantitative coding of Nebraska water legislation spanning more than 50 years (1971–2023).
Data Science & Methodological Portfolio
Spatial Econometrics: Comparative Policy Adoption & Diffusion Modeling
Project Overview: Built a reproducible spatial analysis pipeline to model state-level policy adoption rates. The project evaluates how neighbor proximity and demographic, institutional, and political covariates influence policy diffusion across the contiguous United States.
Project Overview: Cleaned and joined spatial boundary shapefiles with state-level socioeconomic attributes using the sf package in R. Configured spatial weight matrices to run comparative diagnostics across three main specifications: baseline OLS, Spatial Error models (using Maximum Likelihood), and Spatial Lag models. Evaluated model performance across row-standardized and non-normalized binary (B) spatial weight schemes using AIC and BIC.
View the complete code and project repository on GitHub!
Grants, Fellowships, & Scholarships
EMPIRICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THEORETICAL MODELS (EITM), ICPSR Scholarship Recipient
| 2025, $4,375
National Science Foundation funds first- and second-session tuition fees for the University of Michigan’s Interuniversity Consortium for Political & Social Research’s quantitative statistics, mathematics, and computing summer program. Earned two competitive course certifications & networked with peers and career academics.
POLITICAL SCIENCE SUMMER RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP, Research Fellow
| 06-08/2025, $2,000
Researched data & studied at ICPSR to directly support the quantitative chapter of my dissertation.
McKELVIE SCHOLARSHIP, Graduate Recipient
| 2025-26 Academic Year, $4,070
Fund to aid government- and public service-interested careers.
Past awards:
| 2024-25 Academic Year, $5,750
| 2023-24 Academic Year, $2,500
| 2022-23 Academic Year, $4,000
KIECHEL FELLOWSHIP, Research Fellow
| 06-08/2022, $2,000
Researched Russian elite perceptions of the Ukraine and Belarus using the SRE.