Welcome to my website!  I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. Between 2019 and 2020, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of Johns Hopkins University. I graduated with a Ph.D. in political science from the Pennsylvania State University. 

​I study international relations and comparative politics, focusing on ethnic conflict, energy politics, the political economy of development, and East Asian security. In my work, I apply various methods, including elite interviews, field experiments, game theory​, statistical analysis, qualitative archival work, and social network analysis.

​My first book project develops a new theory of how local governments affect ethnic conflict, focusing on China's Xinjiang region as a case in point. 

I am in the early stages of another book project with Johannes Urpelainen and Thomas Hale that examines the political economy of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. We propose a theory of how a transnational consortium develops and pushes a project through domestic bureaucratic politics in both China and recipient countries. This "reverse two-level games" theory further shows how such a bottom-up process is structured by high geopolitics. 

My work has appeared in Energy Policy, Environmental Politics, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Comparative Economics, Journal of East Asian Studies, Security Studies, and The China Review. 

​Click here to see my CV. (Updated, Feb 2, 2024)

​My Google Scholar profile can be found here. 

Inter-elite Networks of the Inner Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (1920s)