About Me
Hi there! Thank you for stopping by.
I’m a doctoral student in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park. I study the behavior of rebel groups in intrastate conflict, with a particular emphasis on rebel governance. Specifically, I explore the impact of rebel governance on violence against civilians as well as the politics of redistribution under rebel rule. I study these topics by relying on quantitative and computational methodologies.
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 have built custom web scrapers to collect data online, employed topic modeling to explore large corpora of text, utilized sentiment analysis to trace changes in media framing and trained cutting-edge language models for classification tasks. At UMD I am a member of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Computational Social Science.
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 have 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.