Major: Ph.D. in Public Policy & Political Economy
“I’m a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Policy, Politics, and Society group at Erasmus University Rotterdam, where I focus on the intersection of technology, politics, and democratic institutions. I earned my Ph.D. in Public Policy & Political Economy from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2025. My dissertation, Digital Sovereignty: The Political Economy of Internet Governance, explores how both democratic and authoritarian regimes shape, filter, and control the internet to serve political objectives. This work is at the center of my broader research on digital governance and censorship.
My research uses computational methods to study how regimes manage online content, the dynamics of political conflict, and the causes and consequences of democratic backsliding. I specialize in natural language processing and machine learning, developing tools that help political scientists and policymakers understand complex global patterns in real time.
At UT Dallas, I worked with Dr. Patrick T. Brandt on the NSF-funded ConfliBERT project. Together we built specialized foundation models for political conflict data. This led to the development of ConfliBERT and ConflLlama, two domain-specific language models that outperform general-purpose LLMs in conflict event classification and do so with much higher efficiency.
At Erasmus, I contribute to the TWIN4DEM project, where we use AI-driven simulations called digital twins to study democratic erosion and institutional resilience. I work with Clara Egger, Asya Zhelyazkova, and a large multidisciplinary team to build machine learning pipelines that model democratic systems at scale.
My work has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Political Analysis, Research & Politics, and Behavioral Sciences.
Huge thanks to the amazing faculty, admin staff, and students at EPPS for making my time at UTD unforgettable. And to my colleagues from Green Hall 2.816 – thanks for the late nights, spirited debates, shared snacks, and all the quiet chaos that made it feel like home. I wouldn’t have made it without you.”