I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, but education and work pulled me eastward. I earned an A.B. in Public and International Affairs and a Certificate in Chinese Language and Culture from Princeton University in 2005, and spent a year between 2005-2006 at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in Nanjing, China with support from Princeton’s Daniel M. Sachs Class of 1960 Graduating Scholarship. I worked for Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, before starting my doctoral studies in 2008. During the 2011-2012 academic year, I conducted dissertation fieldwork in China with support from the SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship and Harvard’s Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship. After the completion of my Ph.D., I spent two years as a China Public Policy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. I served as associate professor in the political economy of China at Oxford’s School of Global and Area Studies from 2016 until 2020, when I joined the faculty of the Keough School of Global Affairs at Notre Dame. I am a Fellow of the National Committee on US-China Relations Public Intellectuals Program, a former Wilson China Fellow (2022-2023), and a current Visiting Senior Fellow for US-China Subnational Relations at the Truman Center for National Policy.