I’m a PhD candidate in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER) at Stanford University.

My graduate research centers on economic development policy and finance, primarily in agricultural and natural resources. I use a range of modern tools, combining causal inference methods with primary (e.g., household surveys, focus groups) and secondary (e.g., censuses, administrative records, geospatial) data to analyze the effects of public investments across spatial and temporal scales. This research relies on extensive fieldwork and engagement with different stakeholders (e.g., development finance institutions, policymakers, scholars) to access nonpublic information that I transform into novel datasets.

I’ve been greatly influenced by precision agriculture (information- and technology-based farm management). That’s not surprising given my connection to The Farm (Stanford University) and more than two decades living in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I’ve been consistently exposed to technological innovations from Silicon Valley and beyond, as well as to their applications in California’s Central Valley, a remarkably productive and predominantly irrigated agricultural region. I bring that exposure to my dissertation by applying precision-agriculture ideas to smallholder farming in developing countries, focusing on policy design, monitoring, and evaluation to assess the effectiveness of public irrigation investments in Bolivia. I take a simple but labor-intensive and unconventional approach by mapping which entities hold relevant administrative data (e.g., project-level documents, investment records), building the relationships needed to obtain them, and curating and linking that information as inputs to my research pipeline. Using these data, I examine irrigation’s impacts on key outcomes at the plot, household, and community levels, from short-term responses to dynamic effects over time. To understand whether these investments are achieving their intended objectives, I combine evidence from these data-driven interdisciplinary studies like pieces of a larger puzzle to see whether they form a robust and coherent story.

While my recent work focuses on development finance and sustainable development, I’m broadly interested in investments and data-driven research — currently exploring ideas in real estate, architecture, coastal tourism development, and public equities.

I also hold an M.A. in Economics from Stanford University and a B.A. in Economics from UC Berkeley.