Social and data scientist experienced in using computational methods like topic modelling and time series analysis to study American politics. I hold a PhD in political science with a specialization in computational social science from the University of California, San Diego and hold a BS in computational physics and a BA in political science with a concentration in American politics from the University at Buffalo. During my time at UB I also served as a founding board member and vice president of Science Demands Action, a non-profit dedicated to using science for social good.
I am currently the Research Director at the MIT Election Data and Science Lab (MEDSL) whose mission is to improve the democratic experience for all U.S. voters by studying how elections are administered. Managing a team of research staff, undergraduate, and graduate students, I oversee the maintenance of MEDSL's extensive election datasets, lead novel academic research, and produce flagship data products like the Elections Performance Index.
Outside of my work in election science I am interested in developing and learning new data science methods . I created speccurvieR, an R package for fast, pretty, and easy specification curve analysis (available via CRAN). I also built a dashboard to analyze track and streaming data related to one of my favorite musicians, check out SufjanViz here.
