I am an assistant professor at University of California, Irvine's Department of Political Science. I am a faculty affiliate at UCI’s Long U.S.-China Institute; Philosophy, Political Science, and Economic program; and a Non-resident Scholar at UC San Diego’s 21st Century China Center.

My research and teaching cover multiple fields in comparative politics and research methodology, including authoritarian institutions and redistribution, political economy of development, citizenship and migration, Chinese politics, and survey research design. The primary focus of my research is identifying how processes of economic development affect institutional change and the relationship between the individual and the state. My forthcoming book, Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship (Stanford University Press), examines sub-national variation in access to citizenship rights in China.

My second project, Globalization, Social Stability, and Inclusion in Authoritarian Citizenship, explores access to government services as an intervening variable between globalization and social (in)stability in China. This project is funded by a National Science Foundation CAREER grant (#2238897).

You can find my research in journals such as The China Quarterly, World Development, Review of International Political Economy, Business and Politics, and Urban Studies. My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Hellman Fellows program, the Department of Education through the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad, and the Social Science Research Council, among others.

I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2017 and was a Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow in Contemporary Asia at Stanford University’s Asia Pacific Research Center. From 2014-2016, I was a Visiting Research Fellow at the National School of Development's China Center for Health Economics Research at Peking University. Before completing my Ph.D., I received my M.A. in International Relations at the University of Chicago, A.M. in Public Policy from University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy, and a B.A. from the University of Richmond.