Welcome!
I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University with the King Center on Global Development in the Institute for Economic Policy Research and am an affiliate with the Refugee REACH Initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I received my PhD in Political Science at Harvard University in May 2025. I hold a master’s degree in Global Policy from UT Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs and in Education Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
I study comparative politics, social policy, and political economy of development with a focus on the education sector and on refugees and forced displacement. My dissertation project examined the sociopolitical dilemmas that characterize refugee integration in national systems in Africa where more than one-third of the world’s 120 million forcibly displaced people live. In my work, 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 common phenomenon in which the de facto inclusion of refugees in public services exceeds what is protected through de jure laws and policies. Using cross-national quantitative, qualitative, and historical methods, I show that quiet inclusion can be a strategic solution for host governments facing dilemmas related to refugee integration and examine how street-level bureaucrats, including teachers, navigate refugee inclusion in policy environments characterized by ambiguity and uncertainty. In my applied work, I use experimental, quasi-experimental, and survey methods to examine the impacts of social policies on social, political, economic, and well-being outcomes for children and communities.
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 Radcliffe Fellowship (2024-2025), 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