Welcome!

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and am on the 2026–27 academic job market. I study conflict resolution and foreign policy, with particular attention to how adversaries use unilateral gestures and public diplomacy to overcome legacies of conflict. My research combines original cross-national datasets with survey experiments conducted across multiple countries.

My broader research agenda centers on three questions: (1) how states and armed groups move from hostility toward peace through unilateral, materially low-cost gestures; (2) how leaders use different public-diplomacy tools to shape foreign public opinion; and (3) why efforts to improve interstate relations sometimes backfire.

My work has received revise-and-resubmit decisions from the Journal of Conflict Resolution and the Journal of Peace Research, and has been published in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. My research has been supported by the Institute for Humane Studies, the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research, and the Program in Arms Control & Domestic and International Security, among others.

I also hold degrees outside Political Science, including Statistics from the University of Illinois and International History from the London School of Economics.