About Me

Since this site’s raison d’être is professional, I should say a word or two about me qua wage laborer.

According to my résumé, I’m an ABD PhD candidate in political science at SUNY Stony Brook. In my actual day-to-day, however, I spent most of my time “upskilling” in AI governance/policy and technical AI safety, two incredibly interesting (and hopefully impactful) areas into which I’m trying to transition. In pursuit of that transition, I recently completed the BlueDot AI Governance course and I’m an active member of the Effective Altruism community – I attended my first Effective Altruism Global(x) event in Mexico City in March of 2025.

During my time at Stony Brook I had the pleasure of taking courses with such luminaries as Stanley Feldman, Andy Delton, and Yanna Krupnikov. The dissertation I’m currently wrapping up under the guidance of Michael Peress consists of three mostly independent chapters, covering immigration opinion’s effect on immigration policymaking at the level of US states, cross-national comparisons of the urban-rural divide across the globe, and an intranational study of urban-rural movements and ideological shifts in the Netherlands. These topics represent my circa 2019 interests preserved in amber, with the aforementioned artificial intelligence areas currently occupying my mental life.

Before landing on the Ye Longe Isle of Bagels & Hockey Fanatics, I taught English for a few years in Ecuador and Peru. And before that, I triple majored in philosophy, psychology, and German at the University of Arkansas (with a year spent at Karl-Franzens Universität in Graz, Austria).

Footnotes

  1. “All but dissertation,” where “all” refers to the sum of the non-dissertation PhD requirements. This designation means that the only remaining task separating my current plebian instantiation from my “Doctor Dollman” self is a dissertation defense↩︎