Hello! I am a Water and Policy Advisor at USAID's Center for Water Security, Sanitation, and Hygiene in Washington, DC. I recently completed my PhD in Environmental Policy and Politics at Duke University, where my research centered on global water governance, resource management, and climate change adaptation. I apply both quantitative and qualitative methods in my work, including computational text analysis, geospatial analysis, discourses, process tracing, and interviews.
I have assisted teaching courses on U.S. and global environmental politics, law, and peacebuilding, including co-teaching a seminar on Mapping WASH and COVID-19 in the Middle East and North Africa. I have also consulted for various international organizations, including USAID, on topics related to water, food, land, biodiversity, and conflict.
Prior to Duke, I was a business analyst and product designer at an education technology start-up and received a BA with honors in Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard University. I was born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya.
Research
USAID Reports
“Water and Conflict: A Toolkit for Programming,” with Erika Weinthal, Geoff Dabelko, Carl Bruch, Jack Daly, and Nikki Behnke, prepared for USAID, January 2023.
“Scaling Back Wildlife Trade in the Mekong Delta: Applying a Political Economy Lens to the Farmer Loophole with a Focus on Vietnam and Laos,” with Edmund Malesky, Songkhun Nillasithanukroh, and Erika Weinthal, prepared for USAID, June 2019.
Papers and Book Chapters
“Debating Desalination: Stakeholder Participation and Decision-Making in Southern California,” In Water Alternatives, 2023.
“Rights, resilience, and water in turbulent times,” with Erika Weinthal, In Global Environmental Politics in a Turbulent Era, 2023.
“Illegal Wildlife Trade in the Mekong,” with Songkhun Nillasithanukroh, Edmund Malesky, and Erika Weinthal, In The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics, 2022.
Dissertation
Managing (Unconventional) Water: Essays on Expert Knowledge, Media Framings, and Stakeholder Debates
My dissertation examines how water management is shaped at the level of international organizations (e.g., UN-Water) and what information on desalination is shared and debated across two other policy-relevant settings: the global news media and a local community. It focuses on these three different settings to capture wide information streams that individually and collectively generate some of the corpus of knowledge on water management and desalination. For individual chapters, please get in touch.
