UW Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow
Specializations
Big Data, Economics & Political Science, Social Sciences
Biography
UW Department of Political Science and Department of Computer Science
Education History
PhD, Political Science, University of Washington, 2019
BA, Philosophy and Legal Studies, Northwestern University, 2005
Research Goals
My political science research examines how systems of power (e.g., governments, legal institutions, media, or religious institutions) advance or undermine rights for marginalized groups. I have conducted research in a variety of geographic contexts, including East Africa, western Europe, and the United States. As a qualitative methodologist with additional training in conventional statistics, I collaborate with computer scientists to integrate qualitative and computational text analysis. This work seeks to triangulate evidence from qualitative, statistical, and natural language processing (NLP) analyses; to leverage text-as-data and other data science tools on messy, real-world, qualitatively coded data; and to scale and amplify qualitative observations, analyses, and sensibilities on big data. As text data is increasingly digitized or generated online, modeling how NLP methods can complement and amplify qualitative research is an important—and largely unexplored—frontier of social and data science.