Welcome! I am an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with an affiliation at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. I am also Director of the Energy Governance and Political Economy (EGAPE) Lab, and a co-founder of The 2035 Initiative at UCSB. My research focuses on the impact of oil and gas resources on governance and environmental politics, and is driven by core questions about the role of government in industry and the design of firm strategies and government policies that will mitigate climate change. My research areas include comparative political economy, energy and environmental politics, and applied political methodology.

I am the author of Power Grab: Political Survival Through Extractive Resource Nationalization (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which shows how dictators maintain their grip on power by seizing control of oil, metals, and minerals production. Some of my other projects examine oil-firm strategies to successfully transition in a carbon-constrained world; the political economy of fossil fuel subsidies; the politics of methane abatement; the logic of transnational corruption in the oil sector; the impact of oil revenues on electoral politics; how resource expropriation hinders labor rights; applied Bayesian statistical analysis; and mapping elite dynamics using statistical network analysis.

Prior to coming to UCSB, I was an assistant professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. I completed my Ph.D. in political science and M.S. in statistics from UCLA. I have served as a non-resident fellow at the Initiative for Sustainable Energy at Johns Hopkins SAIS and the Payne Institute at the Colorado School of Mines, as the GFC Fellow for the Council on the Future of Energy at the World Economic Forum, and as a Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations.