About Me

I am currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz School of Information Systems and Public Policy and the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy and Technology, and I recently completed an APSA Congressional Fellowship where I worked in the US House of Representatives. I work on projects dedicated to understanding campaigns, elections, Congress, and the role of military service in American politics, and I emphasize mixed methods research in my work. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Politics at Princeton University in 2022.

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My dissertation and book project examine the strategic communication of military service records in American congressional campaigns during the post-Vietnam era. In particular, I use evidence from the 2018 congressional elections to evaluate how candidates and parties capitalize on public trust and stereotypical traits of military service members in campaign communications to improve their public image and perceived issue competence. Moreover, I explore the potential dangers of military candidates for public evaluations of the military as an institution. To do so, I use a combination of participant observations, survey experiments, text as data, and electoral returns.

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I have also co-authored projects examining the effect of occupation and class on voters' perceptions of candidate quality and partisanship, as well as work evaluating the role of military identity in congressional roll-call voting.

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I am the daughter of a Naval Officer and lived around the globe before finally calling Orlando, FL, home in 2008. I have a MA in Politics from Princeton University as well as a BA with Honors in Political Science and BS in International Affairs from Florida State University in Tallahassee, FL. When I am not working, I love to paint, cross-stitch, and catch the latest Florida State, Navy, or Seattle Seahawks football game.