I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Georgia Institute of Technology. My research examines organized crime governance, state capacity, and political violence in Latin America, with Brazil as my primary empirical site. I use panel data, spatial econometrics, and causal inference to study how criminal organizations expand their presence and how state infrastructure and security policy interact to produce (or prevent) violence. I ask why do programs designed to create economic opportunity so often produce public insecurity instead in Latin America, and what would it take to design them so they do not?
I defended my Ph.D. in Political Science at Temple University in April 2025 under the supervision of Dr. Hillel Soifer. My dissertation used a staggered difference-in-differences design across 184 municipalities in Ceará, Brazil, combined with eleven months of fieldwork. The dissertation shows how the development of road infrastructure in the state has enticed criminal organizations to move from Brazil’s megalopolis in the southeast to smaller municipalities across the northeast of the country through what I term the “logistical violence premium.”
I currently teach Comparative Political Violence and Government and People in Latin America at Georgia Tech and was previously a visiting assistant professor at Macalester College. Take a look at my Research and Publications pages for more on my current projects, or my CV for the full record. You can reach me on the Contact page.