Personal Statement

I am a Ph.D. student in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. My main substantive interest is understanding why people engage in violent behavior and the consequences of violence on political, economic and psychological outcomes. Particularly, I want to study how (and whether) exposure to violence shapes people’s attitudes and behavior towards state and non-state actors. I hold an M.S. in statistics from Humboldt University of Berlin and a B.S. in industrial engineering from University of Los Andes of Bogota. Before attending U.C. Berkeley, I was a predoctoral fellow at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) within the Institutions and Political Inequality unit.

My work includes evaluating community-driven development initiatives and their effect on citizen attitudes toward authority as well as R-packages for experimental designs and Bayesian methods for causal inference.

Primary Subfield
Comparative Politics
Secondary Subfield
International Relations