Welcome! I am an interdisciplinary social scientist and currently work as an assistant professor of political science & public administration at Montana State University. I received my PhD from the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA), University of Pittsburgh, with concentrations in public administration and political economy. I have been selected as a Harvard-Yenching Institute (HYI) Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Asia Fellow (2024), an American Political Science Association (APSA) Asia Fellow (2021), a Public Administration Theory Fellow (PA Theory Network, 2022), and a SEED Fellow for Social Innovation (2018), as well as a Yenching Scholar (2015-2018). My research and teaching interests include Public Administration & Policy, Digital Politics & Policy, Political Economy of Development, Comparative Politics, and Interdisciplinary Studies, with a primary focus on development, governance, resilience, and the overall well-being of communities (rural, urban, and online communities), using interaction-centered approaches and frameworks. I am particularly interested in interdisciplinary development studies (sustainable & inclusive development; domestic & international development, esp. poverty, public health, sustainability, and welfare), collaborative & interactive governance, local governance, community development, and crisis management in various contexts. The real-world issues I care about revolve around the evolving human-AI-nature interactions (including human-human, human-AI, and human-nature interactions), state-market-society relations, mobilization, social and political engagement, digital self-governance, community engagement, and collective action.Please visit my Google Scholar, Faculty Profile at MSU, and the NSF-funded Project: DigiCARES.My current research focuses on: 

• how institutions (particularly the interplay between formal and informal institutions), 
• technologies (esp. digital platforms, online community-building, and human-AI interaction), 
• and inter-group interactions (human-human interaction, cross-cultural, cross-national, bureaucrat-citizen, urban-rural diversity and engagement, and zero-contact or lockdown) influence both subjective and objective economic, political, and social processes and outcomes for development, governance, policy preferences, public goods, and public service delivery in the short and long term. 
• My research employs qualitative (e.g., interviews, participant observation, archives, and digital ethnography), quantitative (e.g., logit/probit models, DiD, and survey experiments), computational (e.g., machine learning, natural language processing, and social network analysis), and mixed-methods (e.g., interview-survey-online observation) approaches. 

My dissertation investigates why and how the same state campaign produces different development outcomes in local communities, despite their similar starting conditions. My ongoing book project, Interacting for Development: State Mobilization and Social Embeddedness, explores how top-down state intervention and bottom-up public participation evolve and interact in shaping governance and development processes and outcomes across different settings, particularly during state-led development campaigns.