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Welcome to my homepage. I am an assistant professor in UCSD's political science department. I am also an adjunct assistant professor of law at University of San Diego's law school.

In these pages, you will mostly find information about my research and teaching.

Research: My mission as a researcher is to develop, test, and present my best ideas about complexity and emergence in political systems.

Currently, I am working on analyzing data from the first fMRI studies of political cognition. So far, I have provided evidence that well established differences in politcal behavior between political sophisticates and political novices arise from their use of different neural substrates. I run a neurpolitics listserv where you can learn more about developments relating to political science and the brain.

Another way I am testing my theories about the neural underpinnings of political cognition is developing a computational model of political cognition. You can learn about that project here. My grand design is to develop a model of the emergence of ideology. My ambition for this project is to unify insights from my work on neuropolitics with my agent-based models of party dynamics. Eventually, I expect to demonstrate that ideology is an emergent feature of competition among political actors who alter the space of political debate and are then constrained by the resulting alterations.

Teaching: My mission as a teacher is to enable my students to learn joyfully, read carefully, think clearly, and write well.

My teaching philosophy has been heavily influenced by my mother, an award winning educator, and by the research I did into learning while studying the development of politcal thinking skills. In the past, I have TA'd for graduate and undergraduate courses on political theory, American politics, and statistics. Most recently, I have been teaching courses in political psychology, jurisprudence, and race and politics. I love the challenges of teaching and the ways it invigorates my thinking about my research.

Links to my current courses can be found here:

Political Science 191 Senior Honors Seminar