About Me

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. For 2022-2023, I served as China Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.  My research focuses on issues related to the authoritarian regulatory state, the political economy of development, and bureaucratic politics.  

I am the author of On Feeding the Masses: An Anatomy of Regulatory Failure in China (Cambridge University Press, 2017) which examines the regulatory politics involved in China's unrelenting food safety crisis.  The book argues that in order to understand China's governance failures, scholars, regulators, and consumers must take a deeper look at the challenges large-scale countries face (in terms of scale externalities, multilevel coordination challenges, and problem identification).  I have also written on regulatory politics and development issues in aviation safety, environmental protection, fishery conservation, and financial regulation.  

I am published in the China Policy Journal, the China Quarterly, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Regulation and Governance, Politics & Society and the Journal of Politics.  My work has also been cited by a number of media outlets, including Bloomberg, Guardian, the New York Times, the Financial Times, Southern Weekly (南方周末), and Washington Post.  

I seek to unveil the root causes of the world's worst regulatory failures, and the solutions to address broken systems of governance.  I explore the interplay between formal and informal institutions, cultures of risk, and policy entrepreneurs.   What happens when markets rapidly and unexpectedly outpace regulatory development?  Can private actors be trusted to police themselves? How is coordination possible in fragmented regulatory systems?  My next project focuses on China's untamed financial markets to address these pressing questions.

I received my PhD in comparative politics from the University of California, Berkeley.  I was then a postdoctoral fellow at Penn's Center for the Study of Contemporary China.   I hold an MPhil in comparative politics from the University of Oxford and a BA from Harvard College.