I am a first-year Ph.D. student and Theodore H. Ashford Fellow in Government and Social Policy at Harvard University. I am also an affiliate of the Center for American Political Studies. My research examines how legal regimes build, reshape, and constrain American political institutions, particularly the federal bureaucracy and Congress.
I am a trained lawyer. I have worked in the executive branch, on Capitol Hill, in the federal judiciary, and in private practice. Those experiences drew me to questions about how institutions actually work. Much of what institutions do—and how well they do it—turns on things legal categories do not always capture: the motivations and limitations of the people inside them, the organizational cultures that form around them, and the informal practices through which formal authority is exercised. To that end, I am interested in the humanness of the state.
Outside of research, I closely follow the latest in consumer technology and enjoy tinkering with small coding and hardware projects in my spare time. And yet I find myself just as drawn to the analog world, with typography and design as just one example.