I am a Junior Research Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University.

Previously, from 2007-2014, I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University and a member of the graduate field faculty of Near Eastern Studies. I was also on the executive committees for the Peace Studies Program and the Comparative Muslim Societies Program.

In lieu of a blog, here is what is inside my head.

education

I completed my Ph.D. in March 2007 from the Department of Political Science at Stanford University.

During my last year at Stanford, I was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (fall 2006) and at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (winter & spring 2007).

My formal Arabic language training was a hodgepodge of coursework at Stanford, The American University of Beirut's Summer Arabic Program (Lebanon), an AIMS Summer Arabic Program in Tangier (Morocco), and instruction at the Sana'a Institute for Arabic Language (Yemen). For field work, I also had to learn dialects in Jordan and Iraq.

I received my FAA Private Pilot License after training at the Palo Alto Flying Club, now known as Advantage Aviation.

Yes, that combination of Arabic and flight training raised eyebrows for a few years.

Previously, I received my B.A. in Political Science and Economics from Duke University, where I also minored in History.

I graduated from The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham in 1995.