A body of work across geopolitics and food systems — graduate research, a peer-reviewed book chapter, and an independent daily publication. The approach is geoeconomic throughout: economics read as an instrument of state power, carried from energy and investment to climate and agriculture.
How is a changing climate reshaping the agronomic sector of the Iberian Peninsula, and what are the geoeconomic consequences? As heat and water stress alter what can be grown and where, the research traces the effects from Spanish and Portuguese agriculture to farm economies, water policy, and the wider European food system.
The question joins two areas of work — applied food systems and geopolitical analysis — at the scale of a national agricultural sector.
Chinese Foreign Aid and Investment in Central Asia: Implications on Sino-Russian Relations from a Geopolitical Perspective
Across the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century, China expanded its foreign aid, trade, and state-sponsored investment across the five post-Soviet republics of Central Asia. The thesis examines whether those flows affected relations between Beijing and Moscow, analyzing them through geoeconomics and outside standard OECD aid definitions, since neither state operates within them.
It finds that as Chinese energy demand outgrew domestic supply, dependence on Russian oil and gas became a strategic liability. Diversifying toward the resource-rich republics on China's western border, through aid and investment, advanced China's national interest without directly challenging Russia's regional standing.
Written in 2019, before ChatGPT and large language models — the prose, tone, and narrative entirely my own, the statistical regressions run in software, and the primary sources gathered by hand in the archives.
Read the thesis: methodology, framework & findings →
It grew out of a habit — reading across a dozen outlets each day to triangulate a balanced picture of world events. That habit exposed a gap: coverage heavy on the what, light on the why, and rarely organized around region or the strategic stakes underneath.
The answer borrows the form of the diplomatic cable: a dispatch from each of eight regional desks, reading the news the way the discipline does — in prose, in context, with strategy and geopolitics in the foreground.
"Transition Toward a Circular Economy Through Surplus Food Management," in Challenges and Opportunities of Circular Economy in Agri-Food Sector (Springer, 2021).
A co-authored chapter — six authors, four case studies — on how local food systems cut waste at the source, and how non-profits rescue surplus food from farms, groceries, restaurants, and institutional kitchens.
Peer-reviewed, in Springer's Environmental Footprints and Eco-design of Products and Processes series.
Graduate certificate in Sustainable Food Systems — a graduate program spanning the environmental, policy, and public-health dimensions of the food system: sustainable agriculture, food and water security, climate impacts, and the economics of moving food from land to table.
Master of Arts in Geopolitical Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences. Graduate study in political geography, great-power competition, and geoeconomics, concluding with the thesis on Chinese investment in Central Asia.
My undergraduate was completed across three departments at Drake University: business at the College of Business & Public Administration, creative advertising at the School of Journalism & Mass Communication, and a photojournalism program I designed at the College of Arts & Sciences — one that didn't exist until the university approved it.