Ph.D. Student, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
I am a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I also serve as a methods specialist for the Office of Evaluation Sciences, housed in the U.S. General Services Administration in Washington, D.C. My primary research agenda focuses on strategic foreign policymaking among countries in the context of foreign aid. I further have several secondary research projects that include the study of foreign aid to countries experiencing civil war, Chinese media coverage of foreign aid recipients, links between aid recipient governance and aid fragmentation, international migration as both determinant and consequence of international aid policy, and the role of religion in politics. I also have an interest in causal inference, computational methods, and game theory.
Gender in the Pulpit: The Differences in Speaking Style for Men and Women (2019). With Ryan Burge
Is Social Media a Digital Pulpit? How Evangelical Leaders Use Twitter to Encourage the Faithful and Publicize Their Work (2019). With Ryan Burge
Targeting Civil War: Foreign Aid and the Opportunity Cost of Intra-State Violence
Xinhua Coverage of Chinese Foreign Aid Allocations
After Paris, Busan! Progress on Bilateral Aid Fragmentation Afterall?
Fragmented Aid and Recipient Corruption: Diversity of Aid Partners and Corrupt Recipient Motives
Leveraging the “Black Box”: Random Forest Adjustment for Causal Inference
I occasionally have contributed to Religion in Public
In conjunction with my project on random forest adjustment, I’ve developed an R package called “RFA” that provides easy-to-use tools for implementing the method. The latest version can be found here.
I further am developing an R package with tools necessary to estimate a “Strategic Autoregressive Model,” useful for estimating free-riding or competitive behavior among a set of actors. The method is based on the work of Martin Steinwand—his paper describing the method in Political Analysis can be found here. The “SARM” package that I have developed estimates a modified version of the model proposed by Steinwand. The latest version of the package and additional details can be found here.