Biography

I graduated from Macalester College, a small liberal arts college in Minnesota, with a dual major in political science and history. In Minnesota, I worked as a policy intern/legislative aide for several state-level politicians, including State Senator Foung Hawj and later Former Govenor Mark B. Dayton. My duties included analysis and evaluation of state legislation that impacted Minnesota’s disadvantaged ethnic communities, such as Somali, Hmong, and Lao peoples.

I moved to Washington DC in 2014 to pursue a Master of Public Policy degree at Georgetown University. After my graduation from Georgetown in 2016, I worked as a policy analyst/consultant with a number of think tanks and lobby firms in the Greater Capital Area including the Navigant Consulting, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Margolis Center at Duke University.

Since Fall 2018, I have been a PhD student in the Political Science Department at UW-Madison, specializing in authoritarian politics with a regional focus on East Asia. Please find my academic CV and research page here.