I am an Associate Professor at American University (AU)’s School of International Service (SIS) and in its Honors Program, the 2019 Distinguished Service Awardee of the AAG’s Asian Geography Specialty Group, and the 2015 SIS Scholar-Teacher of the Year. Foreign Policy currently ranks SIS 8th globally for its M.A. programs, 9th nationally for its undergraduate curriculum, and 19th nationally for its Doctorate in International Relations. I teach a variety of courses at the undergraduate level, as well as a doctoral seminar on the politics of policy analysis. I graduated from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) with an MSc (Distinction, Best Performance Prize) in Development Management in 2003 and received my PhD in Development Studies from the LSE in 2008. My doctoral supervisor was Jo Beall.

During my graduate studies, I was a pre-doctoral Research Fellow in the Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies (SPURS) at MIT and a Fellow of the Carlo Schmid Program. I also received very generous support from the German National Academic Foundation (grant for top 1% of German doctoral students), the German Academic Exchange Service (doctoral stipend and one-year grant for graduate school fees in the United Kingdom), the British Economic and Social Research Council (+3 Award for doctoral studies), the Mellon-MIT Program on NGOs and Forced Migration (field research grant), and the LSE Graduate School (Graduate Merit Award). I have since been a non-resident Fellow at Copenhagen Business School (CBS) in 2017-18, an Academic Resident at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in 2013, and a Drugs, Security and Democracy (DSD) Postdoctoral Fellow of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in 2012-13.