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Welcome to my homepage. I am a Lecturer at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.

In these pages, you will mostly find information about my research and teaching.

Research: My mission as a researcher is to develop, test, and publish my best ideas about complexity and emergence in political systems.

I have recently completed my first book, Your Brain is Built for Politics. I have been using functional neuroimaging to study how people think about politics. My twitter handle is @polneuro. And, I run a neurpolitics listserv where you can learn more about developments relating to political science and the brain.

Another way I am testing my theories about the neural underpinnings of political cognition is developing a computational model of political cognition. You can learn about that project here. My grand design is to develop a model of the emergence of ideology. My ambition for this project is to unify insights from my work on neuropolitics with my agent-based models of party dynamics. Eventually, I expect to demonstrate that ideology is an emergent feature of competition among political actors who alter the space of political debate and are then constrained by the resulting alterations.

Teaching: My mission as a teacher is to enable my students to learn joyfully, read carefully, think clearly, and write well.

My teaching philosophy has been heavily influenced by my mother, an award winning educator, and by the research I did into learning while studying the development of politcal thinking skills. At UCLA, I was a teaching assistant for graduate and undergraduate courses on political theory, American politics, and statistics. Most recently, I have taught courses in political psychology, jurisprudence, race and politics, complexity theory, and happiness. In my time at UCSD, I was given two awards for my teaching. I love the challenges of teaching and the ways it invigorates my thinking about my research.