About

I am a fifth-year Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. My research interests lie at the intersection of international political economy, international organizations, and domestic politics.

My dissertation is on tariff staging in preferential trade agreements (PTAs), which are rules on the reduction of tariffs, such as the duration of phaseout and the means of phaseout. I present tariff staging as an understudied but highly granular form of flexibility in PTAs. Particularly, I am interested in the political determinants and consequences of tariff phaseouts. My job market paper for the Fall 2025 cycle demonstrates that the structure of US FTA tariff schedules can be explained not just by economic factors but also by the executives’ interests in insulating themselves electorally. Having demonstrated the political incentive to allocate longer tariff phaseouts to industries concentrating in electorally competitive states, my research agenda now focuses on the effectiveness of phaseouts in mitigating the distributional consequences of trade and their potential political consequences.

My dissertation will also introduce PTariff, a novel dataset (co-developed with Elisabeth Van Lieshout) on the treatment of tariffs in the observable universe of bilateral free trade agreements. The database documents the treatment of thousands of unique product tariffs within each agreement at the tariff line level (8-digit). In total, we expect to collect tariff treatment data for more than 100 bilateral free trade agreements, with future expansion to plurilateral agreements contingent on funding.

My research has received generous support from The Institute for Humane Studies, The Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research, and an honorable mention by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program 2022 competition cycle.

I graduated summa cum laude and received my B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Davis. Growing up, neither my parents nor I had envisioned that I would be the first in the family to pursue a Ph.D. Knowing the difficulties all too well, I seek to lower the barrier of higher education for first-generation students, make political science accessible, and encourage more first-generation students to pursue a Ph.D. degree.

In my free time, I enjoy making ceramics (Instagram), watching movies and TV shows, traveling, running, and working out at the gym.