Hello and welcome to my website! 

I am a Ph.D. candidate at Purdue University, studying international relations and public policy. I am particularly interested in the regulatory regimes around AI and Big Tech firms and the power these firms hold in the international system.

My journey to Purdue was a bit unorthodox. I received a B.A. in Middle-Childhood Education from Heidelberg University, Tiffin, OH, and worked as an 8th grade mathematics teacher for five years before attending Purdue. These experiences helped me hone my pedagogy and teaching philosophy, which I have integrated into my award-winning instruction at Purdue. 

Big Tech power and self-governance are the focus of my dissertation project, Big Tech Self-Governance: Responding to Geopolitical Pressures and Salient Issues. The project analyzes a bevy of mechanisms operating behind the platform power of Big Tech firms before focusing on two: issue salience and geopolitical reasons. I further provide a typology of expected Big Tech self-governance actions based on these two mechanisms and explore this typology through process tracing and document analysis. I find that the level of formalization in Big Tech self-governance increases as the level of geopolitical demand increases. 

I am the lead research assistant for Dr. Swati Srivastava's International Politics and Responsible Tech (iPART) Lab, in which we are analyzing the human rights disclosures of Big Tech. I am also a member of the Governance & Responsible AI Lab (GRAIL) and work as a research assistant to the lab's co-direct, Dr. Kaylyn Jackson Schiff. I am currently working with several GRAIL members to understand the impacts of AI ethics labels on end-user trust through a multi-part vignette and conjoint experiment.

There are a variety of methods applied to my projects, depending on the questions at hand. As such, I have pursued advanced methodological training from the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) summer program and the Advanced Methods at Purdue (AMAP) Graduate Certificate through the Methodology Center at Purdue (MCAP). I also have computational experience in R.

I enjoy traveling, camping, and woodworking. I am also an avid sports fan, particularly of college teams.