She recently received her doctorate in political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a major in comparative politics and minor in international relations and is a young, up-and-coming Indonesian scholar. She spent fifteen months conducting fieldwork for her dissertation, titled “Electoral Reform, Party System Evolution and Democracy in Contemporary Indonesia,” which examined the causes and consequences of electoral reform, with a focus on new democracies and the Indonesian case. During her fieldwork she had the opportunity to observe the 2009 national elections with the National Democratic Institute in Jakarta.