I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Government at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Previously, I was a Lecturer at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, a PostDoc at the International Conflict Research Group at ETH Zurich and a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science.

My research focuses on state building, and its effects on local development and conflict, in particular in Africa and Europe. My most recent work explores the reciprocal relationship between ethnic geographies and (sub-)national political borders on both continents since the 19th century. Since January 2026, I am the PI of the ERC Starting Grant project BORDERS, which analyzes the effects of border change on local development and its underlying mechanisms in Europe and beyond.

Throughout, I innovate and use computational methods to collect and analyze large, mostly geospatial and historical datasets. My work has been published by Cambridge University Press and, among other journals, in the American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, International Organization, and the Journal of Politics.