About Me

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University.

I study public policy, with a focus on social policy (including early childhood education and public schooling), Indigenous-state relations, and the political dynamics of federal systems. I am currently engaged on several projects including on government decision-making during periods of crisis, and school choice in Canada.

I earned my PhD in political science from the University of Toronto. I was previously a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at the Center for Canadian Studies at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and the Skelton-Clark Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen’s University. My work has been published in the Journal of Behavioural Public Policy, Regional & Federal Studies, Canadian Journal of Political Science, Journal of Behavioral Public Administration, Public Policy & Administration, among others.

Current Projects

As a scholar of public policy, I am interested in identifying why and when governments make policy change, and studying the impacts that policy change has on citizens.

The relationship between citizens and government is bidirectional. Citizens can shape the policy decisions of governments—they can push governments to act through voting behaviour, through shifts in public opinion, or through direct political action. Government decisions shape citizens’ experiences of the state. Yet, the material and interpretive effects of policy are not evenly distributed. The way public policy distributes resources or influences the relationships between different groups within a population feeds back into the experiences and opinions of citizens, and structures the opportunities for citizens to influence policy.