I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of Government. I am interested in the politics of state formation and nation formation, especially in post-revolutionary settings. I am also interested in democratization, democratic breakdown, and civil conflict. My current work focuses on state-building in the Soviet Union under high Stalinism, and examines the consequences of ethnically-based hiring and mass political purges for bureaucratic quality. Before coming to Harvard, I worked on model-based forecasting for the defense contracting community.