About

Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Harvey Mudd College

2021-23 Data Science Fellow at the Cornell Center for Social Sciences

Co-maintainer of the Cornell Conversational Analysis Toolkit

Research Interests

My research focuses on finding ways to promote healthier interactions in online communities. I approach this problem both from a technical perspective—developing new algorithms and computational models to characterize and detect behaviors that are harmful to online communities—and a social perspective—exploring how such technologies can best be leveraged to create tools and policies with a positive impact.

Concretely, I am interested in the following research questions:

• What are the underlying social dynamics of online misbehavior? That is, rather than trying to characterize individual instances of toxicity, harassment, cyberbullying, etc., I want to look one level higher and understand what kinds of contexts/environments might tend to produce such behaviors.
• Can we apply techniques from artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing to develop formal models of these dynamics?
• How might such models be used to concretely benefit online communities? For example, could we use them to inform new policies that are more effective at promoting healthy interactions, or create new tools to help in the process of content moderation?

Education

• Undergraduate: B.S. Computer Science, Harvey Mudd College (2013-2017)
• Graduate: Ph.D. Computer Science, Cornell University (Advisor: Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil) (2017-2024)

Teaching

Harvey Mudd

• CS 70, Data Structures and Program Development, Fall 2024 / Spring 2025

Cornell

• Various CCSS workshops
• CS/IS 4300, Language and Information, Spring 2023 (Instructor TA) / Fall 2023 (TA)
• CS 4700, Foundations of Artificial Intelligence, Fall 2017 (TA)