I am an Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. My research is on post-conflict reconstruction, stability, transition, democratization, Southeast Asia, the political economy of governance, foreign aid, development, and growth, in particular, for Cambodia.

I earned my Ph.D. in the Department of Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2006, and spent the academic year 2006-07 as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Public Administration at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University.  I also have three master’s degrees: a Master of Science in Agricultural and Resource Economics, a Master of Arts in Political Science (both from UC Berkeley) and a Master in Public Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.  My Bachelor of Arts degree, also from UC Berkeley, was in Economics and Political Science. A brief CV is available here.

In 2008, I won the International Public Management Network’s June Pallot Award for the best article in the International Public Management Journal published in 2007. I became a TED Fellow at TED2009 in Long Beach, where I delivered a TED Talk; in 2010, I gave a speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum and served as a Fulbright Specialist at the Institute of Security and International Studies, Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand; and in 2011, I gave a keynote at the International Baccalaureate Organization’s 25^th Annual IB Asia Pacific Conference in Melbourne, was honored as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, and was elected to a five-year term membership on the Council on Foreign Relations.

I serve on the Advisory Board of the Master of Development Studies Program at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, the Editorial Board of the International Public Management Journal, the Editorial Review Board of the Journal of Southeast Asian American Education & Advancement, and am Vice-Chair of Diagnostic Microbiology Development Program, a non-profit organization that aims to build capacity for functional infectious diseases laboratory diagnosis by strengthening the infrastructure and technical capabilities of technicians and clinical microbiologists in the developing and developed world. Outside research and teaching, I enjoy photography and travel.  

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Read my Who’s Who in America 2011 entry.

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