I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. 

My area of specialization is Comparative Politics, with an emphasis on Latin America. In general, my research interests are focused on political and criminal violence. In particular, I am interested in understanding the causes and consequences of large scale criminal violence in Latin America with a specific focus on Mexico, Colombia, and Central America. The questions I am most passionate about are: Why are some countries ravaged by high levels of political violence? What are the paths for building safer, more peaceful and democratic countries?   

The empirical support of most of my research relies on the generation of event data. To produce this data, I co-developed Eventus ID, a novel software for automated textual annotation of event data from text written in Spanish, French, Protuguese and Russian. To conduct my research I use natural language processing, geographic information systems, statistical anslysis methods, and survey experiments.

I have received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council - Open Society Foundations, the United States Institute of Peace, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. I also received pre and post-doctoral fellowships at Yale University and Cornell University.

My broader research interests include repression-dissent dynamics, human rights, political clientelism and vote buying, political corruption and transparency.

My research was awarded by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) as the best doctoral dissertation in the 4th International Thesis Competition on Public Safety, Victimization and Justice in Latin American and the Caribbean.

Before enrolling in graduate school I served as Civil Society Specialist at the World Bank in Mexico and worked at the Federal Electoral Institute in Mexico.