Welcome to my website! I’m Nick, a PhD candidate in the political science department at the University of California, Merced. Previously, I earned my BA from the University of Texas at Dallas in International Political Economy, and a Master’s in Global Policy Studies at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin.

My research focuses on local and Indigenous political institutions. Check out my job market paper, Power Without Capacity? Local Self-Governance and Economic Development on American Indian Reservations. I use remote sensing measures of economic development to estimate the effect of increasing self-governance on American Indian reservations. Surprisingly, I find that self-governance slows economic development in the short term, with tentative evidence for the influence of tribal governance capacity and experience. This paper is part of my broader dissertation research, which was recognized with the Byran Jackson Dissertation Research on Minority Politics Award from the American Political Science Association’s Urban and Local Politics Section.

I also created and built UC Merced’s State Legislative Simulation website, the engine behind an immersive course where students run the California Senate as senators, lobbyists, and journalists. Bills, votes, donations, position letters, news articles, and social media feeds all update live, and nearly everything runs automatically on student submissions. If you teach a simulation course of your own, the code is on GitHub, and I’m happy to help you adapt it.

Outside of my academic research, I work with First Nations Development Institute on spatial research related to American Indian and Alaska Native communities (check out the AIAN Mapping tool!) and previously with Social Impact on USAID-funded work.