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Born and raised in New York City, I am a proud graduate of Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan. I earned my B.S. in Economics (with a concentration in Business & Public Policy) from the Wharton School and a B.A. in International Studies (with a concentration in Latin American Studies and Spanish Language) from the University of Pennsylvania, as a member of the Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business. During this time, I also spent a semester studying at the Universidad de la Habana in Cuba.
After college, I served for two years as a United States Peace Corps Volunteer in Danlí, Honduras, where I worked with community micro-lending groups, rural water management committees, and an educational center for at-risk children. This experience exposed me to many well-intentioned but ill-fated development interventions and impressed upon me the inextricability of community engagement, poverty alleviation, and environmental sustainability. When I completed my Peace Corps service, I spent four months traveling in Latin America before returning to the United States to begin my graduate studies. I received my PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University, where I was a fellow in the Sustainability Science Program, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance, and the Harvard Environmental Economics Program. During grad school, I served as an intern for the City of Boston's Youth-Led Participatory Budgeting Program, and wrote the first ever evaluation of that program. In association with my doctoral research, I also served as a consultant for various local NGOs in developing countries, including Fundación Natura in Bolivia, Kota Kita in Indonesia, and the BOMA Project in Kenya. After spending a summer as an RA in Kenya, which allowed me to be present during the 2010 constitutional referendum, I was inspired to return the following year for Yale University's Swahili language immersion program in Mombasa. Thanks to support from a Foreign Language & Area Studies Fellowship, I also spent one full academic year during graduate school conducting fieldwork in Laikipia County, Kenya. As a newly minted PhD, I spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder in the Institute of Behavioral Science, which brought me back to Honduras to study decentralization and participation related to a major health sector reform there. I was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at Purdue University in 2022, and I now serve as co-director of the JMK Experimental Social Science Lab. I teach graduate level courses on causal inference and experimental methods. My current research projects explore community-level water management committees in Honduras, village-level Participatory Budgeting in Kenya, and the use of deliberative processes to overcome cynicism and built trust in polarized democratic societies. Apart from my academic pursuits, I am also a certified yoga instructor (RT200Hour), connoisseur of loose leaf teas, and amateur ukulele player. |
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"Concern for man and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors.
Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations." -Albert Einstein |