I am an assistant professor in the Department of Government and Politics and a faculty associate at the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland.

I received my Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan in the spring of 2008. I had started graduate school on 5 September 2001 to study Middle East politics because it seemed "nicely inconspicuous" at the time. Oops.

My research interests include ethnic and religious politics, the political economy of development, quantitative research methods, and the politics of the Middle East.

My dissertation, Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Lebanon and Yemen, won the 2008 American Political Science Association's Comparative Democratization Best Fieldwork Award.

My experiences in the Middle East include several years of study, field research, and travel in Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Morocco.