About me
I am the programme manager for the Horizon Scanning Study Group (powered by ARIA) at Renaissance Philanthropy.
I am also a non-resident fellow at the Energy for Growth Hub, the Centre for British Progress, and the Roots of Progress Institute.
I write about migration, growth, and cost-effective policy wins at Lauren Policy. Outside of my Substack, my work has been published in The Economist, Works in Progress, Asterisk Magazine (1, 2), Foreign Policy, and The Washington Post (1, 2).
My academic background is in political science. From 2018-2021, I was a PhD student at the University of California, San Diego. My research focused on violence and how it influences the development of the societies in which it occurs. My work was supported by the Gates Foundation, the Sanford Lakoff Fellowship and UCSD's International Institute.
I have also done various other things with my life.
- From 2021-2024, I was a research fellow at Open Philanthropy on the global health & well-being cause prioritization team.
- From 2016-2024, I was a QI elf, one of the writers of @qikipedia and contributed to a variety of QI books such as 222 QI Answers to Your Quite Ingenious Questions. (I even have an IMDB!)
- In 2023, I was a Tarbell Fellow.
- In 2020-2021, I was a Graduate Researcher at Ericsson Research. During this time period, I filed two patents on privacy and accessibility in virtual reality with Paul McLachlan and Greg Phillips.
- During my misspent youth, I was an astrophysicist. I hold a MS in physics from UCSD, where I was a San Diego Fellow and Sloan Minority PhD Scholar, and a BS in physics from Caltech. At both institutions, I worked with George Fuller on theoretical neutrino physics and cosmology.
When not working or writing, I am generally being bullied by my cat, Lyra.
