I am a pre-doctoral fellow at the International Security Program at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and PhD candidate in Political Science at MIT.
My research investigates how people get other people to do violent things, from examining relationships between state sponsors and proxy groups, to how civilians relate to and direct military forces, to the internal dynamics of military organizations, to the conduct of military operations. To address these dynamics, I bring to bear mixed methods, including qualitative case studies built on interview and archival data, text classification and analysis, large-N descriptive statistics, and survey experiments. My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
I am a proud Latina, and as a daughter of Cuban immigrants, I have long known the ways that politics is personal. I try to infuse my research on warfare with an awareness that what I study has a real human cost—on both ends of the spear. I believe that only by understanding the tools people use to control and direct violence can we hope to shape policies that minimize the human cost of war.
I graduated magna cum laude with an AB in Government from Harvard University in 2012.
