“Before coming to Princeton SPIA, I spent seven years covering foreign policy, conflict, and climate change in various media and editorial capacities. After majoring in global affairs and Middle Eastern studies as an undergraduate at Yale, I was fortunate to receive a postgraduate fellowship that allowed me to move to Amman, Jordan, for a year-long, upper-level Arabic program. What was originally just supposed to be a one-year commitment would ultimately turn into three and a half years in the region.

I worked with a small, non-profit newsroom called Syria Direct, initially as a translator, then as a journalist reporting on the war in Syria, and eventually as the managing director of that newsroom. In 2018, I returned to the U.S. to work in New York City with the Council on Foreign Relations, a foreign policy think tank. My team created educational resources to teach middle school, high school, and college students about the basic building blocks of international relations, foreign policy, and how the world works.