About

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Davis. My research addresses questions in race and ethnic politics, voting rights, elections, and state politics. My current work focuses on the politics of voting laws. I received my PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles. 

My book project, The Majority Rules: The Politics of Voter Identification Laws, examines the origins of restrictive voter identification laws and what influences political elites to advance voter identification legislation. In this project, I use a unique dataset of state legislator behavior, including roll call votes and bill sponsorship, to challenge prevailing theories on why elites support restrictive voting laws. Evidence indicates that demographic threat plays a more important role in legislators’ strategic calculus than previously stated.

Before my faculty appointment, I was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow (PPFP) at the University of California, San Diego. During my doctoral studies, I served as a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow and a University of California President’s Pre-Professoriate Fellow. My dissertation project was supported by funding and professional development from the Princeton Dissertation Scholars Program through the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice at Princeton University. I held an appointment as a research fellow at the UCLA Institute for Inequality and Democracy at Luskin and served as the Voting and Redistricting Fellow at Common Cause.

I was born in San Bernardino, California and hold a B.A. in Political Science/Public Service from the University of California, Riverside (UCR).