Welcome!

I am Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University. In 2022-23, I was a USIP-Minerva Peace and Security Scholar and a recipient of an APSA-NSF dissertation grant. I am on the academic job market in 2024-25. You can find a copy of my CV here.

I am a comparativist with a regional focus on Latin America. I study the roots of democratic resilience, backsliding, and breakdown. Much of my work on these issues examines how organized crime and public insecurity undermine democratic institutions.

In my dissertation, I focus on one major threat to democracy in Central America and Mexico: deliberate efforts by criminal organizations to influence elections, or what I call criminal electioneering. You can read more about my research and publications here.

I have taught courses on the politics of organized crime, Central American and Latin American politics, authoritarianism, comparative politics, formal theory, and mixed methods. In 2021, I won the Derek C. Bok Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching of Undergraduates. You can find more information about my teaching here.

You can find my general-audience commentary and analysis of Central American politics here. I have also consulted for the World Bank and for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) through NORC on projects related to strengthening democratic institutions in the region.

I have an A.B. from Harvard College and an M.Sc. from Oxford, where I was a Weidenfeld-Hoffmann Scholar and a member of St. Antony’s College. I was born and raised in San Salvador, El Salvador.