Berea College · Class of 2027 · Economics & Political Science

I build the datasets that regulatory arguments are usually made without.

Most policy claims about entry barriers, permitting, and aid effectiveness rest on anecdote because the underlying records are scattered across agencies. I go get them — administrative case files, permit logs, open records requests, interviews in two languages — and then report what they say, including the parts that cut against my own priors.

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Record R-01

Kentucky hospital entry decisions, 2019–2026

N = 491 · logistic regression

Record R-02

U.S. aid localization in post-2003 Iraq

7 interviews · two languages

Record R-03

ADU permitting in Louisville and Lexington

1,014 records · two jurisdictions

Research

Three records

Each entry states the question, how the data were built, the method, the finding, and what the finding cannot support. The last field is the one I would want to read first.

R-01/ 2019–2026· N = 491· Binary logit· Published brief

The Competitor's Veto: What Eight Years of Kentucky Certificate of Need Decisions Reveal

Research intern, Bluegrass Institute · Summer 2026 · sole author

Question: Does objection from existing providers predict whether a new health facility is permitted to enter a Kentucky market?
Data: 491 Certificate of Need applications, assembled by merging two administrative sources on facility name and application year, then coding service type, opposition status, review track, decision timeline, and capital expenditure for each case.
Method: Logistic regression on a binary approval outcome, with competitor opposition and referral to substantive review as the primary predictors. McFadden pseudo-R² = 0.211.
Finding: Against a baseline approval rate near 95 percent, competitor opposition is associated with roughly an 87 percent reduction in the odds of approval, and substantive review with a 74 percent reduction. Both p < 0.001.
Limits: Opposition is not randomly assigned. Incumbents plausibly object to the applications they judge most threatening, so the estimate reflects both the effect of opposition and whatever incumbents observe when deciding to object. Withdrawn applications sit outside the merits rate, which makes the reported approval figure an upper bound.

Brief (PDF) Methods note Code and data

R-02/ 2026· 7 interviews· Coded, two languages· Paper and brief

Rethinking Localization of Foreign Aid: Lessons from the Post-2003 Iraqi State-Building Experiment

Co-authored with Ameer Abedy · Berea College URCPP, Summer 2026 · supervised by Dr. Carlos Poggio Teixeira

Question: When U.S. reconstruction programs in Iraq committed to working through local institutions, what did localization actually consist of in practice?
Data: Seven semi-structured interviews with think-tank scholars at the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute and with implementing-partner and agency staff from RTI International and USAID. Arabic-language interviews were conducted and translated by the authors.
Method: Cross-case qualitative coding against a shared codebook covering local conditions, donor rules and oversight, approval delay, staff turnover, goal ambiguity, and relations between international and local staff.
Finding: Respondents split along a clear line rather than a spectrum: skeptics read the failures as structural to donor-driven statebuilding, while practitioners read the same failures as contingent and fixable. The split predicts which reforms each group proposes.
Limits: Seven interviews cannot establish the distribution of these views across the field, and the sample was reached through professional networks rather than drawn at random. One participant asked not to be quoted directly and is paraphrased throughout; a second was excluded from the findings for falling outside the Iraq scope.

Paper (PDF) Policy brief (PDF)

R-03/ 2022–2026· 1,014 records· Two jurisdictions· In progress

Accessory Dwelling Unit Permitting in Louisville and Lexington

Research intern, Bluegrass Institute · Summer 2026

Question: How long does it take to get an accessory dwelling unit approved in Kentucky's two largest cities, and how often does an application fail?
Data: 546 Louisville Metro permit records and 468 Lexington records, the latter obtained through a Kentucky Open Records Act request (ORR-2026-1237), keyed and coded into status tiers with derived timeline columns.
Method: Record-level status coding and timeline construction, with an ongoing qualitative case study of a specialist builder working near Cherokee Park.
Finding: Two data artifacts have to be resolved before any comparison is meaningful, and both cut against the simple story. Lexington logs each unit twice, once for zoning and once for building, so raw cross-city counts are not comparable without deduplication. Louisville's withdrawn, expired, and abandoned bucket mixes genuine failures with same-day withdrawals, which inflates the apparent failure rate.
Limits: Lexington's records begin only in 2022, so the two cities cannot be compared over the same window. Permit records also show what was filed, not what was deterred — the applications never submitted because of the rules are exactly the cases a permit dataset cannot see.

Working findings Data notes

Writing

Selected writing

Essays and commentary on economic policy, executive power, and the Middle East. Ten items, kept current — not an archive.

Substack · weekly

The Limits on Executive Overreach (LEO) Report

A weekly newsletter on executive power, constitutional limits, and civil liberties. Founder and author.

Book chapter

Chapter 4, Friedman Was Right

Applies the arguments of Capitalism and Freedom to global trade and finance. Includes an interview with Johan Norberg conducted for the book.

Essay · 2025

Surviving Syria: How The Last of Us Mirrors My Reality

On what a video game gets right about insurgency, violence, and what came after the Syrian civil war.

Essay · 2026

From Fiction to Reality: Joe Goldberg and the Moral Logic of U.S. Foreign Policy

Reading a television anti-hero as a study in how good intentions license intervention.

Magazines

The Locksmith Magazine and SpeakFreely

Contributor and editor, writing on Syria's liberation and a free-market reading of Ratatouille.

Regulatory comments

Comments filed with federal agencies

Formal co-authored comments submitted through the federal rulemaking process.

Dept. of Commerce

On the scope of ICTS connected-vehicle rules

Argues the proposed information and communications technology restrictions reach further than the security rationale supports.

Federal Trade Commission

On government influence over online speech

On First Amendment protections in platform moderation and the case for stronger FOIA disclosure.

USCIS

On proposed H-1B reforms

Examines effects on international students, early-career professionals, and small employers.

Curriculum vitae

CV

Download PDF

Education

Berea College — BA Political Science, BS EconomicsClass of 2027 · GPA 3.645 · Berea, Kentucky
Coursework: Econometrics, Applied Statistics, Public Policy Analysis, Legal ReasoningTuition Promise Scholarship · International Student Award

Research and policy experience

Bluegrass Institute — Policy research internSummer 2026 · Charles Koch Institute Internship Program
Berea College URCPP — Undergraduate research fellowSummer 2026 · supervised by Dr. Carlos Poggio Teixeira
Lawyers for Fair Reciprocal Admission — Executive officer, public outreachSummer 2025 · via The Fund for American Studies, Washington, D.C.
Berea College — Teaching assistant, writing course2024–2026

Fellowships and training

American Enterprise Institute Honors Program2026 · under Alex Brill
Hoover Institution Policy Boot Camp2026 · accepted
Cato Institute UniversityFour sessions, Washington, D.C.
Leadership Institute Youth Leadership School2025 · Austin, Texas

Leadership

Students for Liberty — Kentucky state coordinator2024–present
Political Science Association — President2024–present
House Bastiat — President; Editor in chief, Bastiat Policy Journal2025–present

Skills

Quantitative — R, Stata, Excel; logistic and linear regression, dataset construction from administrative records
Qualitative — Semi-structured interviewing, codebook design, cross-case coding
Languages — Arabic (native), English (fluent)

Awards

First place, Economics Marvels competition$10,000 · analysis of Starbucks' economic model

About

I came to Berea College from Syria and stayed with economics and political science because both disciplines take seriously a question I could not stop asking: what happens when rules written to protect the public end up protecting whoever is already inside the market.

That question has taken me to three different sets of records. In Kentucky it meant hospital entry decisions and accessory dwelling unit permits. In Iraq it meant asking why reconstruction programs designed to build local capacity so often did not. The methods differ — a logit in one case, coded interview transcripts in another — but the discipline is the same, and so is the obligation to report the findings that weaken the argument I started with.

Outside research I edit the Bastiat Policy Journal, write the LEO Report, and coordinate Students for Liberty in Kentucky.

Currently

Reading Kentucky permit and CON records
Writing The LEO Report, weekly
Learning Stata, and linear algebra this fall
Looking for Research analyst roles, 2027 start

Contact

Get in touch

I am glad to share data, code, or a methods note from any project here — including the messy intermediate files. If you are hiring research analysts for 2027, I would like to hear from you.