I study how capital moves toward the climate transition — the mechanisms, the incentives, and the stories we tell about risk. Before Columbia, I read behavioral science and psychology at Duke and Duke Kunshan, where I learned to take human behavior seriously as a unit of analysis. On the good days I'm also a photographer.
A four-month technoeconomic brief for Wood Mackenzie's research desk on where quantum computing will — and won't — actually move the needle for energy. Six applications (grid optimization, nuclear R&D, battery chemistry, enhanced solar, energy finance, quantum sensing) scored on a three-axis matrix. Two presentations at Wood Mackenzie, a dozen industry interviews, and one phantom client lead who only ever appeared on Zoom.
A full cash-flow model for a wind farm project — debt sculpting, PTC/ITC tax-equity structures, P50/90/99 production scenarios, sensitivity tests, and an EPC-aligned term sheet draft.
One of two TAs for Lisa Sachs's graduate course on the architecture of climate finance — blended and concessional capital, debt sustainability, carbon markets, the UNFCCC framework, and the cost-of-capital determinants that drive capital allocation in emerging markets.
Financial modeling, investor pipeline research, and pitch materials for a sustainable-infrastructure fund — carbon-removal deals, energy-transition credits, and a CRM rebuild that turned conversations into a working deal view.
Signature Work under Prof. Andrew Macdonald: 1,161 articles across four newspapers — central (People's Daily, Global Times) vs. Shanghai-local (Jiefang Daily, Xinmin Evening Post) — over the April–June 2022 lockdown. LDA topic modeling plus hand-coded content analysis. Finds central and local outlets running coordinated but stratified strategies — hard vs. soft propaganda — with local coverage pivoting to 91% "resilience" framing at the May lockdown peak.
Co-authored with Jason Gainous, Mayra Vélez-Serrano, Kevin M. Wagner, Jialong Wang, You Wu, and Weiheng "Mark" Liu. We analyzed Puerto Rican legislators' Twitter communications from 2014 to 2021 across 43 corruption scandals, combining topic models with a Spanish corruption dictionary and legislator-level models of party status and sentiment. Published OnlineFirst in International Political Science Review on May 9, 2026. DOI: 10.1177/01925121261429933.
Crisis and Security Consulting team. Client work spanned a warehouse security review (Itochu Taicang), HK cryptocurrency-firm regulatory research, threat assessments and mitigation plans, and a CIFF crisis-management workshop.
Signed up for a research internship; landed in a Shenzhen branch office where the day-to-day was sales calls, client onboarding paperwork, and product-pitch prep. Left after three weeks. Honest about it because the lesson — research-track vs sales-track is a distinction the title doesn't capture — has saved me twice since.
“In January none of us had seen a qubit. In April we were the ones explaining them.”
“You build a model. You run 10,000 sensitivities. You still need to decide.”
“The deal's structure tells a story about who is trusted, who is guaranteed, and who absorbs the first loss.”
“Discount rates are also a belief system.”
“Ninety-one percent of the local papers' May coverage was framed around resilience. That's not an accident.”
I trained as a behavioral scientist — four years of asking what exactly is going on here, and what do we mean by “going on”?
That question turned out to be right for project finance, too. A pro-forma is a disguised argument about the future. The assumptions are the footnotes.