She received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University in 2016. Erin’s research focuses on Chinese foreign policy and computational social science. She draws upon field research in China, documents about American foreign policy gained through Freedom of Information Act requests, and datasets of Chinese propaganda. Erin's book project finds that the United States and China employ diplomacy to build trust and substantive cooperation, but that the domestic politics of each country can fundamentally destabilize this process.