Career Profile
Welcome! I am a Data/Computational Social Scientist with almost a decade of experience with programming, machine learning, and natural language processing. I expect to graduate from the PhD Political Science program at the University of Toronto in the spring of 2024. I have published three published articles, where I applied my data science skills to address timely and relevant topics, such as online incivility, contact tracing apps, and electoral interference.
My research interests include: artificial intelligence and large language models, democratic deliberation online, open access to information, technology and justice, law, public opinion, elections, Canadian public policy, comparative and Canadian politics, political economy and blockchain technology. My PhD thesis investigated the state of democratic deliberation on social media. Through my research, I have become very familiar with APIs, webscraping, and working with big data. I also love working with teams! In addition to being reliable, I am able to communicate effectively with my teammates regardless of their knowledge backgrounds.
My skills have allowed me to work on a variety of projects outside of academic research, such as visualizing Canadian federal election riding results for CTV, or even collecting and understanding Ethereum blockchain data. Nearly all of the projects I have engaged in have involved learning a new application of my programming skills. With any work I take on, my goal is either to significantly improve my skill set, or substantively add to it. Learning is my passion.
Publications and Working Papers
Education
In my dissertation I developed a theory about democratic deliberation on social media. I conducted three empirical studies to test each of the hypotheses from my theory.
My specializations were Comparative and Canadian Politics, with a focus on quantitative methodology courses where I learned about statistics for the social sciences and textual analysis.
Example courses:
- Computer-Assisted Textual Analysis
- Canadian Judicial Politics
- Multiple Regression for Political Scientists
- Network Analysis
For my master’s research project, I investigated the effect of traditional news media on public social media discourse using Granger Causality and semi-supervised topic modeling. I presented this work as a poster at the POLMETH Conference in 2018.
My studies included quantitative methods, the digital side of geopolitics, and a startup development course hosted by the Department of Computer Science Innovation Lab (DCSIL) at the University of Toronto.
For “The Business of Software” course, I was paired with two computer science undergraduate students and we developed a Virtual Reality (VR) business. I was responsible for the ideation and business development, including, for example, market research, value proposition, and pitch preparation.
Example courses:
- The Business of Software
- Quantitative Methods and Data Analysis
Example courses:
- Introduction to Quantitative Reasoning I and II
- Data Analysis
- Political Economy of Technology