I am an Assistant Professor in the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University. I’m also part of the Community Data Science Collective, a group of computational social scientists working to understand online communities.
Most of my current research is focused around studying the processes that influence which communities gain attention and membership—why people start new communities, what pathways people take as they join and participate in different communities, etc. More broadly, I am interested in the conditions that promote cooperation, the social construction of understanding and knowledge, and how automated systems (algorithms, bots, etc.) influence the way social cognition happens. Much of my work uses computational and statistical tools to analyze large datasets.
If you would be interested in working with me, then please get in touch!
Recent Updates
- March ‘22 - My paper “A systems approach to studying online communities” was accepted at Media and Communication. The paper [pdf] is my first non-empirical paper. In it, I argue that the data from online communities provides a bunch of exciting new directions for research that takes a systems lens for thinking about how online communities work.
- Spring ‘22 - I am teaching Quantitative Methods for Communication and Communication and Social Networks