My Background
I'm a San Diegan born and bred (with brief childhood stints living in Australia and at Stanford); I love surfing, burritos, and the beach.
I use my background in statistical computing and econometrics to design better public policy and political institutions, and I’m deeply interesting in how we can integrate data and science into the governing process to make government faster and more responsive to the public.
Research Focus
My research focuses on using computational social science methods to adapt American political institutions to 21st century issues like polarization, hyper-competition, and climate change. Recent projects include: using econometrics to analyze the effects of sea level rise and coastal erosion on California’s housing market, using text-as-data methods to evaluate if governments have failed to communicate coastal adaptation policies, and creating and analyzing (using a novel causal inference research design) a major novel dataset on local government meetings and outcomes to evaluate how hyper-competition impacts politics and what type of government are best poised to survive — or thrive — in the competitive politics of today.