I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. My research agenda focuses broadly on crime, urban politics, and subnational comparative analysis. I carry out most of my research in Latin America, but am increasingly interested in building new theoretical, conceptual and empirical connections with similar political dynamics in other regions of the world.

In my first book, Cities, Business and the Politics of Urban Violence in Latin America (Stanford University Press, 2016), I analyzed how the relationships between city mayors, business interests, and criminal organizations shape the ways in which major developing world cities respond to the challenge of urban violence. In my second book, Resisting Extortion: Victims, Criminals, and States in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics, 2022), I tackle the following question: Why do victims resist similar forms of criminal victimization in contrasting ways? In this book I use the widespread but understudied phenomenon of criminal extortion in Latin America to introduce resistance to criminal victimization into the emerging research on the politics of crime.

Resisting Extortion received the 2022 Outstanding Book Award from the Division of International Criminology of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), the Best Publication of 2022 from the Defense, Public Security and Democracy Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), Honorable Mention for the 2022 Giovanni Sartori Book Award from the Qualitative and Multi-Method Research Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA), Honorable Mention for the 2023 Bryce Wood Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), and was the Co-Winner of the 2022 Best Book Award from the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime (IASOC).

I have conducted extensive fieldwork in Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico and other parts of Latin America.