Research

I am a data scientist at Alethea promoting healthy online ecosystems by identifying and thwarting disinformation campaigns, platform manipulation, and other online harms. I hold a Ph.D. in Network Science from Northeastern University, where I was a member of the Communication Media and Marginalization (CoMM) Lab directed by Professor Brooke Foucault Welles. By bringing together network science, machine learning, and social science theory, I study how individuals use social media to amplify their voices, and how that amplification resonates more broadly through online ecologies. In particular, I focus on how such amplification is used to advance and suppress calls for social justice by marginalized communities. Toward those ends, I also advance methodology for conducting computational social science, developing new network and computational text analysis methods to measure the complexities of online communication.

Previously, I was a data scientist on the Applied Sciences team at Twitter, where I worked on Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch), Twitter’s community-driven approach to addressing misleading information on the platform. In particular, I mitigated manipulation of Community Notes by developing novel methods and measures for identifying algorithmic vulnerabilities, and worked with fellow machine learning engineers and researchers to design appropriate safeguards and solutions. Prior to that, I also interned with Facebook Core Data Science, where I worked with the Political Organizations & Society team to identify coordinated information operations and map their reach across online audiences.

Prior to receiving my Ph.D. at Northeastern, I completed an M.S. in mathematics at the University of Vermont. At UVM, I did research with the Computational Story Lab and the Vermont Complex Systems Center under the guidance of Professor Chris Danforth and Professor Peter Dodds. For two summers, I was also a visiting research assistant at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, where I worked with Research Associate Professor Greg Ver Steeg. I hold a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Connecticut.

Publications

See here for a detailed list of my publications.

See Google Scholar for a list of my publications and citations.