I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University. My research interests lie in the Political Economy of International Trade, International Organizations, and Women’s and Human Rights.

The core of my research program is understanding the ways in which the politics of trade and international institutions/organizations influence human rights. My dissertation project investigates when and why provisions related to women’s rights make their way into preferential trade agreements, a highly technical and complex form of international cooperation. I use a mixed-methods approach to answer this question, including elite interviews with trade negotiators and quantitative analysis using novel data on the classification of gender provisions.

I have several other working projects that reflect my substantive and methodological interests. In my co-authored project on official state visits by the United Nations Secretary-General (UNSG), I ask some crucial yet unexplored questions related to the effectiveness of UN diplomacy such as how the UNSG visits impact human rights conditions or foreign aid allocations (in-progress) in the visited countries, using the original dataset of UNSG travel information. Some of my other co-authored working projects use network analysis to examine the relationship between trade and conflict, as well as the effect of US foreign policy on international cooperation.

You can download a copy of my CV here.