About

I am a J.D. Candidate and Toll Public Interest Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

I have held impact litigation internships with Public Justice, ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, and ACLU of Pennsylvania. As a 3L, I will litigate a constitutional rights case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit as part of Penn-Dechert LLP's Federal Appellate Litigation Clinic. I am also a member of The Appellate Project (TAP), a mentorship and professional development program for aspiring appellate litigators from backgrounds underrepresented in the appellate bar. 

Before law school, I worked to strengthen the U.S. refugee protection regime, public health infrastructure, and federal social safety net. Most recently, I was a researcher at American Oversight, a FOIA litigation and government transparency organization, where I spearheaded investigations surrounding public health and immigration issues. Before that, I served as Special Assistant to the Commissioner of Health for the City of Baltimore. There, I worked to advance evidence-based approaches to addressing public health challenges. 

During the 2016-2017 academic year, I was a Fulbright-Schuman grantee and Visiting Research Fellow at Migration Policy Institute Europe in Brussels, Belgium. My Fulbright project examined the role of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in supporting the job readiness and labor market integration of refugees in Sweden and Germany. I am an active member of the Fulbright Alumni community. Most recently, I served as an application reviewer and finalist interviewer for the Fulbright-Schuman program. 

I began my public service career as a Truman-Albright Fellow in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) during the Obama Administration. My evaluation portfolio included federal cash assistance and safety net programs. I also briefly served in the Office of Policy & Strategy within the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), where I produced background papers for agency leaders on the unique protection needs of unaccompanied immigrant children and dissemination materials for research on the H-1B visa program, "credible fear" claims, and the defensive asylum process. As an undergraduate, I held internships at the Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM) at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where I provided research assistance for a book project on humanitarian crises and migration, and at the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission (IHREC) in Dublin, Ireland, where I researched the country's Direct Provision accommodation system for asylum seekers. 

My research and advocacy have been recognized by the Clarendon Fund (University of Oxford), the U.S. Mission to the European Union, the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation, the American-German Institute, and the Canadian Association for Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (CARFMS), among others. 

I earned my M.Sc. in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, where I was a Clarendon Scholar and a member of St. Antony’s College. I hold a B.A. from Boston College, where I was a Truman and Fulbright Scholar.