Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor and the Internship Program Director for the Political Science Department at California State University, Sacramento. My research and teaching focuses more broadly on international relations and research methods. Specifically, I explore the dynamics of violent and nonviolent resistance movements and the ways in which they are affected by external support from outside actors. I use a mixture qualitative and quantitative methods to examine how different kinds of support from different actors change the likelihood of resistance, the strategies of resistance movements (i.e. violent or nonviolent), and the variance in outcomes from these movements. 

My journey to studying resistance movements really started with my grandfather, whose stories about the civil rights movement and participating in the March on Washington encouraged me towards a life of activism. Living in a time where we are seeing a resurgence of mobilization around the very same issues that sparked the protest my grandfather participated in, it is more crucial than ever to center conversations in our classrooms and our research towards meaningful societal change. For this reason, much my teaching and research focuses heavily on experiential learning, policy and conflict resolution.