I am a political scientist studying why people think and behave the way they do in political life – and why the gap between what institutions expect of citizens and what citizens actually do is so persistent. My research shows that political behavior is systematically shaped by psychological mechanisms that are often hidden from both actors and observers, including motivated reasoning, cognitive biases, and implicit beliefs about fairness and desert. I study these mechanisms across a range of political phenomena, from how people form ideological views and evaluate candidates, to how they develop attitudes toward inequality, climate change, and public health policy. A central goal of my work is to use these insights to inform the design of institutions that are compatible with human psychology, aligned with democratic values, and capable of advancing public goods.

My research is both theory- and data-driven. A central part of my work is computational: I apply natural language processing and large language models to large-scale text data from social media and political speech, using advanced statistical models to measure beliefs, emotions, narratives, and political discourse at scale. I complement this with formal modeling and agent-based simulation to develop and test theoretical predictions, and with survey experiments and incentivized economic games to identify causal mechanisms in a controlled setting. Together, these approaches allow me to study the psychological and institutional foundations of political behavior across varied contexts and data sources. You can find my publications and projects in the Research tab.

My work has been published in PNAS, the Journal of Environmental Psychology, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, and the Journal of Public Health Policy. My research has also been supported by an APSA Summer Centennial Center Research Grant.

I teach Computational Text Analysis for Social Sciences, which covers machine learning and natural language processing using both R and Python. You can find the course materials on my Teaching page.

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics and the Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics . I received my Ph.D.  in Political Science at Stony Brook University in 2023.