About Me
Hi there! Thank you for stopping by.
I’m a PhD candidate in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park. My dissertation project seeks to explain why rebel groups use distinct repertoires of violence against civilians in civil war. I examine these strategies of violence with a mix of quantitative, computational and qualitative methodologies. In addition to collecting novel observational data to estimate regression models, I am conducting fieldwork in Turkey to gather evidence for my theory via interviews with survivors of the Syrian civil war.
My enthusiasm for computational social science has also led to several collaborative projects that lie apart from my research agenda on intrastate conflict. Over the past years I built custom web scrapers to collect data online, employed named entity recongition to label large corpora of text, utilized sentiment analysis to trace changes in media framing and trained cutting-edge language models for classification tasks. Recently, I also gathered experience in computational image analysis for political science. At UMD I am a member of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Computational Social Science.
Currently, I serve as the managing editor at the Journal of Conflict Resolution. You can submit at JCR here.
Before coming to the United States, I completed an MA in International Studies/Peace and Conflict Research at Goethe University Frankfurt and a BA in American Studies at Leipzig University. During my time as an undergraduate and graduate student in Germany I also studied as an exchange student in the United States and Turkey on German Academic Exchange Service and European Union scholarships. In addition, I worked in research roles at Peace Research Institute Frankfurt and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.
Feel free to reach out to me with any question you might have!
You can find my CV here.