I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science and a Graduate Research Fellow at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) at Columbia University. I study international security, conflict, and cooperation, with an emphasis on formal modeling and statistical analysis. My dissertation investigates the causes and consequences of international mediation in wars. I address the issue of the strategic selection of mediators both theoretically and empirically, and I show that the policy-relevant conclusions about the effects of mediation that we draw from such an analysis are substantially different from an analysis that treats mediation as a non-strategic, exogenous intervention, as much of the relevant quantitative literature does. I use an original dataset of post-Cold War conflict management events to argue that mediation improves the chances of a settlement, but only if we account for the effects of mediator selection.

My research interests in conflict, strategic leadership, and quantitative methods have also led to papers on the economics of rebel recruitment and on how to detect election fraud in data-poor environments. I have written code to estimate marginal effects after multinomial probit models. Feel free to email me for more information.

Click here for an annotated version of the op-ed "The Devil Is in the Digits" (co-authored with Alexandra Scacco), which appeared in the online version of the Washington Post on June 20. You can also download the R analysis code and the data we used from the presidential election in Iran.