I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University and a Mellon Graduate Fellow at Columbia's Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP). I study comparative and ethnic politics, with a regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. My dissertation investigates the micro-dynamics of ethnic conflict in contemporary Nigeria. In particular, I'm interested in the question of why ordinary people choose to participate in violent ethnic riots.

I've also done research on post-conflict peacebuilding, electoral manipulation, ethnic identity formation, effective methods for asking sensitive questions, and the costs and benefits of respondent-driven sampling.

Starting in the fall of 2009, I will be an assistant professor in the Wilf Family Department of Politics at New York University. During the 2009-2010 academic year, I will be a Post-doctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University.

Click here to see an op-ed, "The Devil is in the Digits," (co-authored with Bernd Beber) about election fraud in Iran, which appeared in the online version of the Washington Post on June 20, 2009. An annotated version of the article, containing more detailed information about methods used, is available here. You can download the analysis code and the data we used from the presidential election in Iran.