My substantive research interests include the study of various forms of political violence, substate analysis of domestic conflict, the relationship between civil and international wars, the nexus between geography and war, the economics of forced migration, politics of the Middle East, and US foreign policy. My methodological interests include spatial econometrics, geographic information sciences, predictive modeling/forecasting, data visualization, and programming. I also enjoy playing soccer, hiking, camping, and cooking on my free time.
Technical Skills
Statistics
Hypothesis Testing, Classification, ANOVA, Robust methods, GLM, Non-parametric regression, Spatial statistics, Predictive modeling, SEM, Random Forests, LDA, PCA, Network Analysis
Research Design
Survey methodology: Qualtrics, Amazon Turk
Qualitative methodology: QCA, Ethnography
Computing
R, Python, Stata, SPSS, SQL, DOT, Excel
Data Visualization
R Shiny, Plotly, Tableau, ggplot2, ArcGIS, QGIS, markdown, LaTeX, ggmaps, GoogleViz, Graphviz
Languages
English (native), Persian (fluent), Spanish (beginner)
Education
2009 - 2016
University of Southern California
PhD Political Science
MA International Relations
Certificate of Quantitative Research Methods
2011, 2012, 2014
Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research, Summer Program Fellow
Advanced methods for quantitative social science
2004 - 2008
Indiana University - Bloomington
Political Science
International Studies
Certificate in Central Eurasian Studies