Welcome!
I completed my PhD in Political Science at Harvard University in May 2025. I am currently a Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2024-25) and am a visiting scholar with the Refugee REACH Initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Beginning in July 2025, I will be a postdoctoral fellow at the King Center on Global Development at Stanford University.
I study comparative politics and political economy of development with a focus on the politics of education and on refugees and forced displacement. My dissertation project focused on the politics of refugee integration in national systems in Africa. Refugees test the limits of state obligation: they are inside national borders but outside political membership. I frame refugee integration as a distinct political economy challenge shaped by uncertainty, contested responsibility, and divergent incentives across transnational, national, and local interests. In my book project, I introduce the concept of ‘Quiet Inclusion’ to describe a phenomenon in which the de facto inclusion of refugees in public services exceeds what is protected de jure. Using quantitative, qualitative, and historical methods, I show that quiet inclusion can be a strategic solution for host governments facing dilemmas related to integration.
My research has been published in World Development, Development Policy Review, The Journal of Refugee Studies, and the Journal on Education in Emergencies, as well as in popular media and policy outlets. I have received numerous competitive grants including a Fulbright research fellowship and funding from the Displaced Livelihoods Initiative, the Weiss Fund for Development Economics, and the International Rescue Committee’s Airbel Impact Lab. I am the 2023 winner of Jeanne Block Humphrey Dissertation Award from Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science.
My academic interests are shaped by more than a decade of professional and policy experience with the World Bank, UNHCR, the Education Commission, the Center for Global Development, among others.
Education:
PhD in Political Science (Government), Harvard University
Master of Education Policy, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Master of Global Policy Studies, UT Austin LBJ School of Public Affairs
BA in Government & Humanities (Honors), University of Texas at Austin