I am a joint PhD candidate in Political Science and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, working at the intersection of political communication, political psychology, and political behavior, with a regional focus on the United States and Western European multiparty systems. Methodologically, I specialize in survey research, with particular expertise in non-probability samples from voting advice applications.

My dissertation examines whether foreign publics develop attachments to the political actors of other countries — stable, cognitively central orientations toward foreign political actors that shape how they think and behave politically. I argue that such attachments give rise to transnational opinion leadership: publics with stronger attachments to foreign political actors are more likely to follow their cues and resist attitude-discordant information. While I focus primarily on attachments to U.S. political actors among the publics of U.S. allies, I argue the phenomenon extends to other dyadic cases. This form of cross-border political influence carries underrecognized implications for soft power and democratic autonomy abroad.

My work has been published by or is in press in journals such as International Studies Quarterly, European Union Politics, Foreign Policy Analysis, Global Policy, and Nature Scientific Data. My work has been commissioned by NATO, by ministries, national media outlets, advocacy organizations, and think tanks such as the Clingendael Institute and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. My research has also featured in Dutch parliamentary commissions of inquiry.

You can find my Penn profile on the Annenberg School for Communication Profile and the Political Science Department websites. I am being advised by Sarah Bush in Political Science and Yphtach Lelkes in Communication. My committee is further comprised of Diana Mutz and Dan Hopkins. I am affiliated with the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics (ISCAP) and the Center for Information Networks and Democracy (CIND). In 2021-2022, I was the Miller & Lavigne Graduate Fellow and a University Graduate Fellow in Political Science at the Pennsylvania State University, where I focused on quantitative methods in political science research.

In addition, I am a research fellow at the Kieskompas – Election Compass Institute where, between 2016 and 2021, I primarily developed Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) and conducted large-n opinion research. Currently, I lend my knowledge and expertise to my colleagues at the research institute, assist with VAA and survey design and analysis, and implement the skills and knowledge acquired through my doctoral program to further the scientific mission of the institute.

At Kieskompas, I have developed over 30 VAAs, the most notable of which are the ones for the Dutch parliamentary elections in 2017 (over a million responses) and 2021 (2.5 million responses), the Iranian local and presidential elections, the Dutch municipal elections in 2018 (for example Amsterdam), the European elections in the Netherlands, a European political persona tool, the US Democratic primaries in 2020, as well as a ‘Trump Meter‘ that has been disseminated in 8 countries, and has collected over 700,000 responses. Overall, more than 8 million voters have made use of VAAs I developed.