I am an urban planner and geographer whose research concerns how the development of geospatial technologies and evolving demands for underground energy resources have shaped the Indonesian state.
This is the paragraph in which I describe my pedigree. (Apologies in advance!) I studied international politics as an undergraduate at Tufts, and was the first in my family to graduate from college. I was also the first to attend graduate school when, after a stint teaching in South Korea, I studied geography and geographic information science at UConn. I was supported by multiple departmental and university fellowships. In 2015 I left for Indonesia as a Fulbright scholar. It was the biggest and most geographically-complex country I knew nothing about. I went to learn about the strategies adopted by local state planners to navigate the contradictory, overlapping processes of administrative decentralization and rapid urban expansion. I stayed in Jakarta for two more years, working as a development practitioner. I also came to feel as much at home in Java’s megacities and intensively cultivated countryside as I do in the floodplains and secondary forest of my childhood home along the Connecticut River. Maybe even more so. Eventually, though, I returned to the States in 2018 to study urban planning at Harvard. I concentrated in analytics and international development planning, was a Presidential Scholar, received the Heffernan Prize from the Graduate School of Design, and earned several grants from the Harvard Asia Center. By graduation—after a project researching the role of information technologies in primitive accumulation, a summer interning with UN data scientists in Jakarta, and writing about Indonesia’s conflict-ridden efforts to make its territory and population legible—I’d become thoroughly skeptical of conventional development approaches in general, and the boosterism around “digital” and “data-driven” development more specifically. I also realized that I’d found a topic interesting enough to hold my attention long enough to write a dissertation. In 2020, I began a PhD in global development at Cornell (Curriculum Vitae), where I am a Dean’s Excellence Fellow. My research on the energy transition in Indonesia has received support from Cornell’s Einaudi Center, the State Department’s Foreign Languages and Area Studies Fellowship, the Atkinson Center for Sustainability, and Global Development’s RANA Prize.
Though I am primarily interested in qualitative social science, including ethnographic methods, I’m also data- and compsci-curious. I’m excited to get beyond clicking around QGIS or writing dinky R scripts and getting into stuff like…setting up my own website. And thinking about how computational capacity is transforming our economies, societies, and politics.
You can find me at Cornell, or on LinkedIn, Academia.edu, Github, Twitter, and Instagram.