Greetings

I am a first-year student at The University of Texas School of Law. Previously, I was a political scientist and an assitant professor in the Department of Government at American University. I studied American politics, specifically campaigns, elections, and voting behavior. This website is in the process of being updated, so please bear with me.

My current resume is here.

Research & Papers

My academic CV is here. My published papers can be found here.

Dissertation

I defended my dissertation, Learning Curves: Three Studies in Information Acquisition , in July 2008. It is a collection of three articles addressing normatively important questions about the role of political information in forming public opinion, impacting political participation, and influencing electoral outcomes. These varied but related projects all address the consequences of political information in contemporary politics. My first chapter asks, "What campaign information matters? Which campaign events are actually informative?" I develop a new measure of information flow using data from Tradesports, a political prediction market, and a Bayesian estimation technique which adapts models from the economics literature. The second chapter asks, "Do candidate visits impact issue salience, public opinion, and ultimately vote choice?" I use survey data combined with a data set I organized containing the location and topics of all speeches given by Bush and Kerry in 2004 to empirically test the conventional wisdom that candidate appearances change electoral outcomes. My third chapter looks at the online social networks of college students and asks, "How does the information that students 'accidentally' encounter in electronic social networks impact their political knowledge?" This chapter combines survey methodology with an experiment testing source credibility to document the occurrence of this phenomenon and suggest a causal mechanism.

Teaching

I have taught at the undergraduate and graduate levels. For more information, please go to my Teaching web page.