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
- May ‘23 - Our paper on the landscape of extreme belief formation online was published in Socius. [paper]
- March ‘23 - Our paper on the communication networks of wikis was published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. [paper] [blogpost] [Mastodon thread]
- March ‘23 - The paper that Sohyeon Hwang and I wrote about why people participate in small online communities got a mention in this Washington post article (and Sohyeon got the closing quote!)
- Spring ‘23 - I am teaching Quantitative Methods for Communication