Thanks for visiting. I am a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. In Autumn 2024, I will join the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor, jointly appointed to the Department of Political Science and Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.

I research the psychology of power in international relations, notably the effects of relative state power on human thought and behavior. Power is a relative material attribute, but so too power is a feeling and experience that changes leaders and publics, a point largely lost on IR to date.

My book project shows that the feeling of power inflates threat perception. This project derives from my dissertation, which received the Honorable Mention for the 2023 Waltz Award for best dissertation from APSA’s International Security Section. Leaders of stronger states paradoxically feel less secure and, more perniciously, feel an irrational capacity to solve those imagined fears through aggression. In addition to historical research, I use a range of experimental, network, and computational statistical methods.

I received my PhD in international relations from Ohio State in 2022. My work is published or forthcoming at the American Political Science Review, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Peace Research, and Security Studies, among other outlets. I was previously the Diana Davis Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow in US Foreign Policy and International Security at Dartmouth's Dickey Center and a US-Asia Grand Strategy Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Korean Studies Institute.