About

I’m a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science and the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego. My research interests include international trade, emerging technology, and democratic backsliding, with a general focus on the political economy of globalization.

My dissertation examines the domestic politics of export controls. While controls justified by national security have grown exponentially over the past decade, they track the threats meant to justify them surprisingly poorly. I argue that this gap is made at home, though not as the politics of trade protection would predict. Where tariff politics treats the state as an arena for competing producer interests, denial has no such constituency: no firm demands denial of its own sales, so on whether to control, the state acts as a principal with security interests of its own. Politics re-enters on allocation: an economic logic identifies where controls should fall, district politics determines which deviations survive, and firms bargain over how tightly the final line binds.

I received my B.A. in Political Science / International Relations from UC San Diego, graduating magna cum laude and with High Honors, and I received my M.A. in Democracy and Governance from Georgetown University, where I graduated with High Honors.

You can download my CV here.