Department of Political Science

I am an Assistant Professor of international relations and methodology in the Department of Political Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, where I won the Outstanding Junior Faculty Award (2022). I completed my PhD at the University of Minnesota, where I also obtained a MSc in Applied Economics. Within international relations, my research has involved innovative approaches to studying the causes of civil conflict, with an emphasis on how environmental pressures shape patterns of political violence. My methodological interests include limited dependent variable models, econometric and causal inference methods, mixed and combined methods approaches, and event data. My research attracted the support of the National Science Foundation, the Henry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Dickey Center at Dartmouth College, and the United States Institute of Peace, among others.

My work has appeared or is forthcoming in multiple academic journals, including Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution and American Journal of Agricultural Economics, and has been mentioned in policy outlets such as Foreign Policy, The Monkey Cage (Washington Post), and NPR. My book, The Politics of Mass Killing in Autocratic Regimes (coauthored with Bumba Mukherjee), which was published in June 2018, explains when and where food shortages can lead to mass killing within nondemoratic states.