About Me
I design experiments and software to study the ways in which humans and algorithms interact in digital spaces, especially as they pertain to influence and information seeking. Currently, I am a research scientist at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. Before coming to Stanford, I completed my PhD in Network Science at Northeastern University, and was lucky to be advised by Christo Wilson, a computer scientist, and David Lazer, a political scientist. Additional details on my past work, education, and affiliations can be found on my LinkedIn. I used to occasionally post on Twitter, but have now moved to Bluesky.
Research
My research aims to help us better understand the intersection of user choice, algorithmic curation, and choice architecture in online platforms. It has been published in top journals, including Nature, Science Advances, PNAS, and in top computer science conference proceedings, such as the Proceedings of the ACM: Human-Computer Interaction, the Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW), and Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). A complete list of my research outputs is available in my curriculum vitae (PDF), and my Google Scholar profile is available here.
According to Altmetric, a website that tracks the reach of published work, my work has been cited in over 300 news stories, on five different social media sites, and in several patents and Wikipedia pages (see here). According to Sage Policy Profiles, a website that tracks policy citations specifically, my work has been cited in over 100 policy documents produced by governments and organizations around the world (see here).
Software
I primarily use GitHub to release and maintain tools or datasets from my research. Among these are WebSearcher, which provides tools for collecting and parsing web search engine results, and suggests, which provides tools for collecting and analyzing search engine autocomplete suggestions. Some stats related to the projects on my GitHub are available in the widgets below (see here for how to create your own).
I used to contribute to Stack Overflow, a Q/A website for programmers, when I was learning how to code. My top-rated answer was about launching a Selenium WebDriver with a browser extension installed, and my top-rated question was about moving a heatmap color bar in Python. One comment on my top-rated answer—"This worked for me after countless hours. Thank you."—made all the time I spent on that site worth it. Some additional stats related to my Stack Overflow account are available in the widget below.