About me

I am a second year PhD student jointly between Physics and Sociology at the University of Michigan. If that sounds weird, ask me about it! My two wonderful advisors are Elizabeth Bruch and Mark Newman.

I often label myself as a computational social scientist working in the complexity science tradition; basically, I want to develop and use creative theoretical models, paired with well-defined and abundant observational data, to help social science become more predictive, mechanistic, interpretable, and (one day) paradigmatic. I like big, rich, wacky datasets and network-based inferential methods and models. The weird and winding road that brought me here crossed through physics, applied political philosophy, and the sociology/political science of climate change. I still love each of those areas and occasionally work in them, but I’m most focused on doing creative empirical computational social science. Since I love learning about new fields and I say “yes” too easily, I also have ongoing collaborations in neural network interpretability, theoretical community ecology, climate modeling, and evolutionary biology.

In my spare time I love oil painting, reading sci-fi and history books, learning to cook, and rock climbing, running, or biking as much as possible.