Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. I study the effects of technology on international security with an empirical focus on China. My first book, Under the Nuclear Shadow: China’s Information-Age Weapons in International Security (Princeton University Press, 2025) explains how China leveraged information-age military technologies (offensive cyber operations, counter-space capabilities, and precision conventional missiles) for coercion in the nuclear age. My research also examines the global nuclear order, nuclear strategy, escalation dynamics, and other novel sources of leverage in international politics in East Asia.
I have held fellowships at Yale University, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Stanford University, Harvard University and Renmin University of China. I spent over a year doing field work in China in 2015-7. My work has been supported by the Smith Richardson Foundation, MIT Center for International Studies, and the China Confucius Institute. My current research projects are supported by the Stanton Foundation and the Ploughshares Fund.
I completed my Ph.D. at the Political Science Department at MIT in 2018, where I was also a member of the Security Studies Program. I was an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the George Washington University from 2019-21. Before commencing my doctoral studies, I was a research associate at the Lowy Institute for International Policy and was admitted to practice as a lawyer in Australia.
Photo (above): a former missile testing base outside of Beijing, now a memorial to the scientists who developed China's nuclear weapons and missile program.
