Welcome! I am a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2024-2025, I will be a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. I will join Yale University’s Department of Political Science as an Assistant Professor in July 2025. My research focuses on civil society, social movements, and bureaucratic politics in the contemporary Levant and broader Middle East.

My scholarship combines insights from immersive qualitative research with analysis of self-collected administrative, network, geo-spatial, and survey data. At MIT, I am affiliated with GOV/LAB and the Global Diversity Lab. I am grateful to MIT’s GOV/LAB and Center for International Studies as well as Innovations for Poverty Action for supporting my research, which has been published at Nature Human Behavior and conditionally accepted at the Journal of Politics.

Before beginning my PhD, I worked for several years as a journalist, researcher, and analyst focused on governance, humanitarian aid, and the wartime economy in Syria. I also completed a Fulbright Fellowship in Jordan and graduated with a BA from Hamilton College and an MA from Johns Hopkins SAIS, where I received the Christian A. Herter Award for Academic Excellence. I regularly make use of my Arabic proficiency in my research. Though my given name is Elizabeth, most people call me “Biff,” a name that translates exceptionally poorly out of English. You can call me whichever name you’d prefer.

You can download my CV here or say hello at ekpm@mit.edu.