She joined the Department of Political Science at Wayne State University in 2012, after serving as a Dornsife College Postdoctoral Distinguished Teaching Fellow at the University of Southern California (USC). She holds a Ph.D. in Politics and International Relations from USC (2011). Her research interests include diaspora and migration, Middle East politics, foreign policy analysis, human trafficking and the intersection of culture and gender. She has conducted field research in Syria and Lebanon, where she was a research affiliate at the Lebanese Emigration Research Center at Notre Dame University- Louaizé.