She earned her Ph.D. (2013) and M.A. (2009) degrees in Government at Cornell University. She held a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University before joining the Department of Political Science in the fall of 2014. During her doctoral research on the violence and uncertainty that confronts Central American migrants in transit, she conducted two years of fieldwork along unauthorized routes in El Salvador, Mexico and the United States. Her research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright Garcia-Robles program, the Bucerius Program at the Zeit-Stiftung, and the Einaudi Center for International Studies and the Institute for Social Science at Cornell University. Her work has been published in International Studies Quarterly, Antipode, Geopolitics, and Migration Studies.