Welcome! I am an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Merced. I received my PhD in political science from Harvard University. My research is on comparative political and economic development. I work on three main topics: (i) technology; (ii) democracy; (iii) and state capacity.  Much of my work is on rural India, including my book project on how technological change in agriculture transformed politics in the developing world, but I also often work comparatively as well.  

I direct a lab on the Political Economy of Agriculture and Rural Societies (PEARS) which specializes in projects using natural experiments, geospatial methods and machine learning. I am affiliated with CAPE,  IGCC and CaliWEPS and have previously been a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. My research has been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Economic History, and International Organization and received multiple awards from the American Political Science Association. Here is a link to my CV. Thanks for visiting!