I am an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. My research sits at the intersection of the social sciences and statistics. My mission is to create a body of research that bridges these two worlds — with an emphasis on answering causal questions — within which experts from both worlds can have dialogue with one another and foster beneficial collaborations.

My research sits primarily in the field of causal inference and survey design and analysis. My main research agendas focus on external validity of experiments, falsification testing, and survey weighting.

My main line of research concerns external validity of experimental findings. I work on methods that allow researchers to generalize experimental results beyond the units, treatments, outcomes, and contexts upon which they were conducted.

When researchers cannot conduct RCTs, they are typically left to estimate causal effects in observational data using strong assumptions about how treatment is non-randomly assigned. Another emphasis of my research centers on filling the need for statistical tests of observable implications of these core identifying assumptions that allow researchers to bolster credibility of their designs.

In 2012, I ran the polling operation for Obama for America’s Analytics department, which very accurately predicted election outcomes in the campaign’s battleground states. I also co-founded a successful analytics and technology start-up, BlueLabs, focused on providing analytics services to clients in politics, issues advocacy, healthcare, and education.

My time in industry has strongly informed my research agenda, particularly my work on survey design and analysis. My research in survey design and analysis focuses on statistical methods for leveraging detailed individual level data to overcome the non-random nature of modern survey data.

I hold a PhD in Political Science and an MA in Statistics from the University of California, Berkeley. I also completed a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Princeton University Department of Politics. In 2020-2021, I was an Harrington Faculty Fellow at the University of Texas, Austin in the McCombs School of Business.

If you can’t find me around the office, chances are I’m climbing some rocks somewhere.