 I am currently a Research Fellow with the Lab on Institutional Corruption at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University (2011-2013). Previously I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Political Theory Project at Brown University (2010-2011). I received my PhD in Political Science from Duke University in 2010. More information about my current appointment can be found at: My fields of interest include Political Theory, Political Economy, and Public Policy. In my dissertation, I engage wide ranging debates concerning the methodological foundations of social science, with a particular focus on the nature of ethical convictions and the phenomenon of persuasion. I show how and why ethical persuasion is crucially important for resolving many social problems that have proved intractable within conventional frameworks of social science analysis, such as negotiating multicultural difference in liberal democracies and developing the political-economy of the third world. The interests animating my dissertation have also led to a number of side projects, including experimental field work on "trust," laboratory investigations of interactions between institutions and preferences, and philosophical appraisals of biological-behavioral research, supported in part by my own empirical criticisms of reductionist claims surfacing in behavioral genomics. As a fellow at Harvard's Ethics Center I am currently working on a series of theoretical and empirical studies aimed at better characterizing diverse rationales for corruption and distrust in political, financial, and medical institutions. The results will help inform a further set of investigations that examine strategies for eliciting ethical conscientiousness in situations where straightforward incentive design is infeasible. |