■ Arizona State University
Assistant Professor of Social Data Science, School of Social and Behavioral Sciences
information scientist studying misinformation, platform governance, and AI ethics — and training students to do it rigorously and responsibly.
Assistant Professor of Social Data Science at Arizona State University, with a PhD in Information Science from the University of Washington (2017); also Senior Global Futures Scientist at ASU, Senior Research Fellow at New America, and affiliate faculty at the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics.
My research examines how digital platforms and artificial intelligence are reshaping political communication and democratic institutions. My scholarship makes three interventions: online resistance in information environments, including social movement dynamics and misinformation; rigorous ethics and methodology for collecting, analyzing, and preserving digital trace data; and responsible AI, from fairness in training datasets to the evaluation of AI systems in high-stakes human contexts. Methodologically, I develop new approaches for studying online movement dynamics — pairing qualitative inquiry with computational methods to ground and contextualize what the data show — that expand empirical validity and ethics, including transparency about the data's limitations. I also build innovative approaches to preserving digital trace data, ensuring scholars and practitioners can access it well beyond my own publications.
My work is interdisciplinary because the problems require it. Studying online resistance in information environments demands social movement theory and data science together; turning social media traces into legal evidence demands computer science, law, and ethics together — the combination I work in as a Visiting Researcher with the ERC-funded MERCURY project at the University of Copenhagen. I build partnerships across those lines — with scholars spanning journalism, communication, digital humanities, law, and computer science, as well as with policymakers and non-profits — and publish across information science, internet studies, communication, political science, the humanities, network science, international law, science and technology studies, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence.
Beyond academia, my work fills critical data gaps for non-profits and government agencies. I led the methodological work on a New America policy paper on Parler and the January 6th insurrection, which the U.S. House Select Committee cited extensively in its final report, and I have consulted with the Committee directly. I designed and led the collection of digital trace data on the Wagner Group, the Russian paramilitary organization, from Telegram and VK — data I continue to develop as legal evidence for the International Criminal Court, Europol, Norwegian prosecutors, and the Metropolitan Police in London, with portions publicly accessible to researchers, prosecutors, journalists, and the public. Through these partnerships — policy reports, op-eds, articles, and expert testimony — my scholarship addresses pressing public issues.
I have published in peer-reviewed journals including Information, Communication & Society, the International Journal of Communication, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Convergence, the American Behavioral Scientist, and Nature Partner Journals (npj) Complexity, and in peer-reviewed conference proceedings including the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference and the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). I served as lead co-chair of the Digital Methods minitrack at HICSS (2020–2023), and have presented at the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), the International Communication Association (ICA), the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), the American Political Science Association (APSA), the Research Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials (RESAW), the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology / Society for Social Studies of Science (EASST/4S), and Sunbelt, among others. I gave the 2023 keynote on trace data and ephemerality at the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México in Toluca, and I co-organize an ongoing workshop series on responsibly training foundation models, most recently in Los Angeles and at CSCW 2025 in Bergen.
The National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and Sandia National Laboratories, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Election Integrity Fund, and corporate gift funding have supported my work.
I developed ASU’s Social Data Science graduate program alongside one other faculty member — authoring three new courses, launching the online program in Spring 2022, and specifically responsible for its computational methods core.
Affiliations
Five distinct but interconnected streams — fairness questions run through the AI safety agenda, and platform data access underpins both the misinformation and legal-evidence work. Each stream tackles problems that require multiple fields to address, with impact inside and outside academia.
Crisis Conversations: Evaluating AI Responses to Suicidal Ideation. How do AI systems handle mental-health crisis conversations? The project builds multi-turn scenarios with escalation, clinician-anchored rubrics, decomposed scoring, and lived-experience interviews — with open-source deliverables.
PUBLICATIONS — in preparation
With Sony AI collaborators: a taxonomy of the challenges in curating fair datasets (NeurIPS Datasets & Benchmarks 2024), plus a workshop series on responsibly training foundation models — the Los Angeles workshop at the ASU California Center (September 2025) and CSCW 2025 in Bergen. I also study datasets as infrastructure, from Know(ing) Infrastructure: the Wayback Machine as object and instrument of digital research (Convergence) to my Machine Learning Day talk — and advance this agenda as a founding member of ASU's AI & Ethics Workgroup.
PUBLICATIONS — A Taxonomy of Challenges to Curating Fair Datasets (NeurIPS, 2024) · Know(ing) Infrastructure (Convergence, 2023) · What is AI? (2026)
A long-running program on how platform data lockdowns reshape disinformation research — from the 2019 Information, Communication & Society special issue to the 2022 Routledge volume Disinformation and Data Lockdown on Social Platforms. It extends to intermedia agenda-setting in the gun-control movement — Gun Control Agendas in a Networked Digital Environment (Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly) — where ephemeral websites proved prone to conspiratorial content — and Mobilizing Consensus on Facebook (HICSS 2022), on networked framing of the U.S. gun-control movement on Facebook. The ephemerality thread also runs through Working Within a Black Box (International Journal of Communication, 2014), on transparency in the collection and production of big Twitter data. Most recently, Value and vulnerability: a framework for understanding the complexity of misinformation use (npj Complexity, 2026) proposes a value-and-vulnerability framework for why misinformation spreads.
PUBLICATIONS — Value and vulnerability (npj Complexity, 2026) · Disinformation and Data Lockdown on Social Platforms (Routledge, 2022) · The disinformation landscape and the lockdown of social platforms (ICS, 2019)
Can a Telegram post become evidence of war crimes? With the ERC-funded MERCURY project at the University of Copenhagen, I work on social media data as legal evidence — anchored by the Wagner Group Telegram dataset, presented at the International Criminal Court and Europol in The Hague (2023).
PUBLICATIONS & DATA — Wagner Group Telegram dataset (2024)
With Allan Colbern: how U.S. news has framed immigration, immigrant rights, and nation-state violence from 1989 to the present — a 500,000-article corpus analyzed with large-scale NLP, underpinning an Oxford University Press book proposal.
PUBLICATIONS — Civically Engaged Research (CER) (Politics, Groups, and Identities, 2025) · Crisis Framing of Immigration Politics in United States Newspapers, 1980–2022 (2024) · Illegality and Enforcement in the Framing of Immigrant Education in US Newspapers (2023)
Visiting Researcher, MERCURY Project, University of Copenhagen — and panelist on the hybrid discussion panel on researching mercenaries: country case studies, methodological challenges, and the role of data science.
Co-organized the workshop on Responsibly Training Foundation Models at CSCW 2025, Bergen, Norway.
Co-organized the workshop on Ethical Principles and Data, ASU California Center, Los Angeles.
Interdisciplinary Practice Award, School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Arizona State University.
Presented Wagner/Telegram network research at the International Criminal Court and Europol, The Hague, Netherlands.
Keynote, "Trace Data: Preservation, data quality, and the ephemerality of social media data," Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, Toluca.
Co-edited Disinformation and Data Lockdown on Social Platforms (Routledge) with Dan Mercea and Marco Bastos.
Selected work. Full list in my CV — h-index 14, 7,100+ citations as of September 2026.
I teach the way I do research: by giving students direct experience with the data and methods that define contemporary public life. On the first day of every methods course I state the core value my teaching rests on — our job is to increase analytical rigor while decreasing the potential harms of "big data" research. Most of my students arrive new to programming, so I build courses around applied assignments using real, messy public data, errors and "warts" included, and I avoid "plug-and-chug" statistics in favor of helping students grasp data holistically: what platforms choose to expose and withhold, and what those limits imply for the claims built on them.
At ASU I teach graduate courses in social data science, where students learn to collect, analyze, and critically evaluate large-scale digital trace data. I was one of two faculty who built the Social Data Science graduate program — developing the original designs for three foundational courses and its computational methods core, and helping launch the program online in 2022, teaching across modalities.
ASU — Graduate
Extracting, processing, and combining data to understand social and institutional change: structures of the Web, programming for data extraction, storing data effectively, and tools for manipulating, visualizing, summarizing, and transforming what you collect.
Foundations of scholarly inquiry and research design in the context of data and society. Original course design.
Advanced computational methods in the practice of social science. Original course design.
Big data is useless if we cannot communicate it to those who need it — policymakers, managers, or the public. Techniques for communicating complex data in writing, verbally, visually, and through interfaces. Original course design.
How communities form, manage themselves, and improve through the use of networked technologies.
Capstone: students collaborate on a substantial project on the social use of data, bringing their theoretical and technical skills to bear and producing a public portfolio of their work.
Self-designed special-topics course on how automated systems and algorithms distribute opportunity and harm.
The intellectual, practical, and ethical dimensions of engaging in applied research, with emphasis on empirical and quantitative research methods.
ASU — Undergraduate
Statistical techniques of the social and behavioral sciences.
Theory and methods for analyzing networks on social media.
Seminar on misinformation and disinformation campaigns past and present, focused on the COVID-19 pandemic and 2020 election through news media, social media posts, videos, and memes. Students combine qualitative, quantitative, and historical methods to build expertise in detecting misinformation campaigns and analyzing social media and visual data.
UW — Graduate & Undergraduate
Relational database design and SQL, taught during the UW Information School PhD. Undergraduate.
Client-side web development with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, taught during the UW Information School PhD. Undergraduate.
Server-side web development and database-backed web applications, taught during the UW Information School PhD. Undergraduate.
Graduate course on the principles of information retrieval systems, taught during the UW Information School PhD.
Mentoring is where my teaching has its longest effects. I mentor by apprenticeship: students join active research early, take ownership of a defined piece, and learn the full arc from question to publication. Twenty-one students have co-authored twenty-two publications, posters, and presentations with me. Through ASU's Immigration and Citizenship Lab I have mentored more than thirty graduate students in large-scale data collection and text analysis, and I have co-led multi-semester misinformation research experiences for fourteen Barrett Honors undergraduates. As a Faculty Fellow in ASU Library's Data Science and Analytics Lab, I lead open, hands-on sessions — from machine-learning analyses of 100,000-article news corpora to AI ethics workshops — for students, faculty, and staff university-wide.