Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida in the School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs and the Cybersecurity and Privacy Research Cluster . I am also a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University and a Fellow at the Political Economy Forum at the University of Washington. My research broadly focuses on the threats digital technology pose to liberal democracy (specifically online misinformation) and policies designed t
My research interests encompass the areas of political communication, public policy processes, and computational social sciences. I am particularly interested in how social movements and interest groups influence the political agenda and the decision making process in the current media environment. My methodological interests and strengths are natural language processing (text as data), computer vision (images as data), and machine learning and artificial intelligence in general.
In my research projects I collaborate with the Social Media and Political Participation lab, in studying how social media shapes protest dynamics and in using social media data to better understand political responsiveness. I also collaborate with John Wilkerson and Matt Denny in a NSF-funded project developing text as data methods to study the lawmaking process in the U.S. Congress; and with John Wilkerson and Nora Webb Williams in another NSF-funded project developing computer vision methods to study how