I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Middle East Initiative. I am the PI of the NSF Collaborative Award, “Advancing the study of repression: The Global Surveillance and Censorship Scores (GSCS) dataset.”
My research is primarily concerned with authoritarian institutions and publics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). My research interests include gender & politics, electoral institutions, and public opinion & survey research. My research has been published or is forthcoming in American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, Politics & Gender, and more.
In addition to the NSF, my research has been funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the American Political Science Association, the Project on Middle East Political Science, Harvard's Middle East Initiative, UCLA's International Institute, Rice University's Baker Institute Center for the Middle East, and the Centennial Center for Political Science and Public Affairs.
I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from UCLA and a B.A. in Political Science and Economics, with a minor in Arabic from Washington University in St. Louis. I spent a semester abroad at the American University in Cairo. I have conducted fieldwork in Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Morocco, UAE, and South Korea (Yemeni refugees in Jeju Island).