I am a visiting assistant professor of political science and public policy & law at Trinity College. I received my PhD in political science (with distinction) from Yale University in May 2025. While at Yale, I was affiliated with the Institution for Social and Policy Studies.

I am chiefly interested in American presidential democracy, understanding the role of presidential leadership in America's system of separated powers. My current book project, drawn from my dissertation research, concerns “presidential prioritization,” the process by which presidents and their teams determine the domestic policy issues on which they will focus at the start of their administrations. It advances an agency-centered perspective on agenda construction that emphasizes self-assertion over conformity to external constraints, exposing the internal contradictions of presidential democracy across nine case studies from the modern era. The empirical backbone of the project is archival research, which I supplement by interviewing senior White House personnel, along with analyzing public opinion and combing through other primary and secondary sources. This research has been generously funded by the Bach Fellowship and the Scowcroft Institute at Texas A&M University. Portions of this work have appeared in Presidential Studies Quarterly and Evaluating the Obama Presidency: From Transformational Goals to Governing Realities (De Gruyter 2024). 

A companion project, Congressional Expectations of Presidential Self-Restraint (co-authored with John A. Dearborn; Cambridge University Press, Elements in American Politics Series, 2025), focuses on how Congress has designed laws reliant on an assumption that presidents would respect statutory goals by declining to use their formal powers in ways that were legally permissible but contrary to stated congressional intent. Focusing on appointments legislation in the post-Watergate era, we demonstrate lawmakers' reliance on presidential self-restraint in statutory design and identify a variety of institutional tools used to signal those expectations. Moreover, we identify a developmental dilemma: the combined rise of polarization, presidentialism, and constitutional formalism threatens to leave Congress more dependent on presidential self-restraint, even as that norm's reliability is increasingly questionable. A prior version of this project earned the 2025 MPSA Patrick J. Fett Award for the best paper on the scientific study of Congress and the presidency.

I am likewise in the early stages of a third book project, which concerns legacy interests as a driver of presidential conduct over time. I will be presenting my initial theory with an empirical application to the Gilded Age at the 2025 APSA Conference.

Additionally, I am extremely passionate about pedagogy and undergraduate research. At Yale, I ran the Dahl Research Scholars program, and I received a Certificate of College Teaching Preparation from the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning in 2023.

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