Biography

I am a political scientist studying the use of causal evidence in international development policy. A primary objective of my work is to understand the political, institutional, and behavioural barriers to evidence-based policymaking, and how they can be overcome. My research is motivated by questions including: what factors prevent policy makers from applying high-quality social scientific research, particularly causal evidence, to pressing public policy challenges? What kinds of interventions can we develop to improve the use of evidence in policymaking?

I combine computational social science tools with causal inference approaches to study these and other questions.

Before starting my PhD, I worked in a number of roles at the intersection of social science and public policy. I served as the inaugural Director of Research for the Penn Development Research Initiative – DevLab@Penn (PDRI) at the University of Pennsylvania. Before that, I was an Advisor with the Behavioural Insights Team’s (BIT) Canadian office in Toronto. I helped build BIT’s Canadian practice in its first two years of existence. Earlier, I was part of the Incubator team at Evidence Action in Washington, DC, an NGO that scales evidence-based development interventions to improve the lives of millions in low-income countries. I worked on sourcing, designing and prototyping development interventions backed by rigorous academic research.

Education

B.Sc. in Economics, Vienna University of Economics and Business (2013) | MA, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) (2016)

Research Interests

Comparative politics; political economy of development; causal inference; evidence-based policy; causal inference

Graduate Advisors

Graeme Blair (co-chair), Darin Christensen (co-chair)