People
Faculty
Kat Albrecht
Kat Albrecht is pursuing a PhD in Sociology at Northwestern University and a JD at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. Her research focuses on investigating how the structure of data shapes research conclusions and broader sociological theory. Using machine learning methods, quantitative causal inference, and mapping techniques she primarily builds and analyzes large criminal justice datasets. She is especially concerned with the economics of fear, the working definition of homicide, and the general state of crime data. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota where she first began exploring the junction of computational methods and the social sciences.
Natalie Gallagher
Natalie Gallagher is doctoral student in psychology at Northwestern University. She is fascinated by the human ability to think about social phenomena that emerge from human interaction - social networks and social categories. Exploring these, her work lies at the intersection of social and cognitive research. She draws on psychological, sociological, and computational methods to pursue her questions, and is interested in how research can inform social change. Natalie received her BA in psychology and theater from Georgetown University, and has an MA in psychology from Northwestern.
Tina Law
Tina Law is a PhD student in sociology at Northwestern. Her research explores why we continue to live in unequal neighborhoods even as our cities are constantly changing. In particular, she uses computational methods and large-scale, digitized data from administrative systems and archival sources to understand how historical events shape contemporary neighborhood racial inequality. She is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. She holds an MA in sociology from Yale.Speakers
Joshua Becker
Joshua Becker is a postdoctoral fellow with the Kellogg School of Management and the Northwestern Institute of Complex Systems. Their research on collective intelligence uses agent-based models, online experiments, and data science to examine how network dynamics shape group decisions. Joshua’s current research focuses on how communication networks can increase or decrease the accuracy of factual beliefs in areas such as financial forecasting, political beliefs, and medical diagnoses.
Sushmita Gopalan
Sushmita is a data scientist at the Northwestern Neighbourhood and Network Initiative at Northwestern University. She uses network and spatial analysis to understand the ways in which social ties, space and their intersection influence behaviour. She has a B.A./M.A. in Economics from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and an M.A. in Computational Social Science from the University of Chicago.
Maira Khwaja
Maira is a first generation Pakistani-American, born and raised in Pittsburgh. She studied history at the University of Chicago, focusing on the South Side of Chicago. She interviews young people about their experiences with police, produces events and workshops, and guides outreach communications for the Invisible Institute, a 501(c) journalism production company.
Sharon Meraz
Sharon Meraz’s work resides in the interplay of political communication, networked journalism, social networks, and mass media theory. As a scholar centrally interested in political activism and political engagement online, she explores how mass media effect theories take shape and evolve due to the growth of networked, social media technologies that empower political publics. In bringing a social network analytic perspective to the evolving media ecology, she has explored such new theoretical premises as networked gatekeeping, networked framing, network agenda setting, memetics, and virality. Meraz is also interested in automated content analysis, natural language processing, and social network visualization of big data. Her work has explored political activity and activism networks in such social applications as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and online political forums during electoral cycles, disaster times, and social movements. Meraz is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Department of Communication. She also serves on several diversity committees and initiatives at the university, including the Summer Research Opportunities Program (SROP) and Fellowship Committees for Minority Students.
Andrew Papachristos
Andrew Papachristos is Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University and he is the Director of the Northwestern Neighborhood and Network (N3) Initiative. He is also a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern. His research aims to understand how the connected nature of cities—how their citizens, neighborhoods, and institutions are tied to one another—affect what we think, feel, and do. His main area of research applies network science to the study of gun violence, police misconduct, illegal gun markets, street gangs, and urban neighborhoods.
Aaron Shaw
Aaron Shaw studies organization, collaboration, governance, and inequality in online environments. His current projects try to understand why and how a few peer production communities (like Wikipedia) grow and sustain valuable public information resources when most do not. Aaron is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, where he directs the Media, Technology & Society (MTS) Program. He is also a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and a member of the Community Data Science Collective, which he founded together with Benjamin Mako Hill. During 2017-2018, Aaron held a Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellowship in Communication at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University.
Rochelle Terman
Rochelle is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where she’ll begin as Assistant Professor in Fall 2020. Her research examines international norms, gender and advocacy, with a focus on the Muslim world. She is currently working on a book project that examines resistance and defiance towards international norms. The manuscript is based on her dissertation, which won the 2017 Merze Tate (formerly Helen Dwight Reid) Award for the best dissertation in international relations, law, and politics from the American Political Science Association. She teaches computational social science at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, including Machine Learning for Political Science at Stanford and Introduction to Computational Tools and Techniques at Berkeley. She is a certified instructor with Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science with a designated emphasis in Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to Chicago, she was a post-doc at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.Teaching Assistants
Daniel Trielli
Daniel Trielli is a PhD student at the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern. He is researching computational journalism and how news reaches the public in our increasingly algorithmically-defined world.Participants
Abigail Smith
Abby Smith is a PhD student in the Department of Statistics at Northwestern. She is interested in record linkage and missing data in the context of global health and human rights.
Andrew Szmurlo
Andrew will matriculate the PhD program in Information Science at Cornell University this fall. He is interested in network analysis, causal inference, online communication and incentives. He also likes: running, ML algorithms, cryptocurrency, and pizza.
Chad Van De Wiele
Chad Van De Wiele is a PhD student and NSF-IGERT Fellow in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Chad employs a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches to study social networks; specifically, his research focuses on political discourse, affect, visuality, and representations and reproductions of race, class, gender, and sexuality within networked spaces. Chad has presented his work at various academic conferences, including NCA, ICA, and AoIR, and has published work in proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Social Media + Society.
Christina Schoenberg
Christina Schonberg is a postdoctoral research associate at UW-Madison. They earned their PhD in Developmental Psychology from UCLA and BA in Psychology from Northwestern University. Christina studies how variability in early language experiences (e.g., infants who are raised in monolingual vs. bilingual homes) influences outcomes such as cognitive flexibility and vocabulary development. Their graduate training focused on behavioral lab-based methods such as eye-tracking, and they are now learning methods for incorporating larger-scale datasets (such as longitudinal speech corpora) into their work as well.
Crystal Shi
Crystal Shi is a PhD candidate in the School of Hospitality & Tourism Management at Purdue University. She received her Master’s in Hospitality & Tourism Management in December 2013 from Purdue University. Prior to returning to Purdue to pursue her PhD, Crystal spent four years working in the hotel industry. She started as a management trainee at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel in Seattle After that, she was promoted to the position of Food & Beverage Manager at the Fairmont Peace Hotel in Shanghai. Crystal’s research area is primarily employee well-being, turnover intention, and psychological contract in the hotel industry. She is particular interested in conducting research regarding the daily fluctuation of hotel employees' daily well-being and turnover intention.
Donghyun Kang
Donghyun Kang is a Ph.D. student in Chicago Sociology Department, working at Knowledge Lab. His overarching academic interest centers on the hybridization of ideas. Using cutting-edge network and text analysis methods, he aspires to shed light on the social conditions, processes, and consequences of interdisciplinary research. He is also interested in employing experimental designs to study the social processes that generate consensus or dissonance when conflicting theories and evidence coexist. Prior to coming to the University of Chicago, Donghyun received a B.A. in Business Administration and M.A. in Sociology at Seoul National University. He also worked as a research associate at Social Network Computing Center (SNCC) in Seoul National University, where he collaborated with researchers from Cyram Inc.
Eric Dunford
Eric Dunford is an Associate Director and Assistant Teaching Professor for the Master of Science in Data Science for Public Policy program in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. His research focuses on the organizational and tactical behavior of violent non-state organizations. He is currently involved in a number of projects regarding event data integration, predicting conflict processes, and leveraging online video game data to study how groups innovate and adapt.
Erin Anderson
Erin M. Anderson is a PhD candidate in Psychology at Northwestern University. Her research examines our learning processes from infancy into adulthood. Currently, she is investigating what helps us recognize patterns across different contexts, and whether being surprised at an unmet expectation can motivate us to seek out more information and revise our beliefs.
Ikiltezilani Mazehuani
Ikiltezi is a graduate student at The University of Chicago where she studies sociology. She has also held public policy and political science fellowships at Princeton and Duke Universities. As an immigration scholar, her research currently explores the effects of legality on immigrants. Specifically, she studies the effects that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program has had on the lives of young people who hold this work authorization, particularly their level of economic integration. Prior to graduate school, Ikiltezi worked for five years on behalf of unaccompanied migrant children through the Office of Refugee Resettlement and Heartland Alliance. She currently works at The University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration where she studies the impact that waiting (to regularize one's citizenship status) has on the lives of older undocumented adults.
JungHwan Yang
JungHwan Yang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My research sits at the intersection of media effects, political communication, and political behavior. I study how the current media landscape affects the patterns of news media use of the public and political elites: from understanding people’s reactions to different political events on social media to examine the way some government uses their powers to influence the way people talk about politics. I am currently working on multi-wave panel survey data combined with online tracking data of the panels to understand the political effects of information use.
Kevin Pedraza
Kevin Pedraza is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Northwestern University. His research interests generally revolve around using geospatial methods to study crime. He hopes to expand his in computational social science skills to develop more sophisticated research designs for understanding variations of crime at the meso-level unit of analysis.
Leah Castleberry
Leah Castleberry is a first year Master of Public Policy (MPP) candidate at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. Through her studies, she is exploring the ways in which the intersections of business, policy and innovative technologies can be used to create a more equitable future for marginalized communities. Her research interests include cultural competency in artificial intelligence, algorithmic bias and the digital divide. Prior to graduate school, Leah worked as a Senior Cognitive Consultant at IBM Global Business Services. She received a B.B.A. in International Business from Howard University in 2015.
Nick Hagar
Nick Hagar is a first-year PhD student at Northwestern University, where he’s a member of the Computational Journalism Lab. He researches the people and technologies that produce journalism online and how they impact each other. He holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University and has worked in audience development and analytics for several digital newsrooms.Ole Hexel
Ole Hexel is a doctoral candidate in the joint Ph.D. program between Northwestern University and Sciences Po Paris. At Northwestern, I have worked with Prof. Lincoln Quillian on an international meta-analysis of racial discrimination in hiring. At Sciences Po, I participate in a field experiment on anti-discrimination training. I use Python, mostly for web scraping, and R, for exploring and visualizing data.
Peter Choi
Eungang (Peter) Choi is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at The Ohio State University. He is also a graduate affiliate for Institute for Population Research (IPR). His research focuses on identifying fertility trends and using verbal autopsies to analyze causes of death. Methodological interests include Network analysis and NLP. He is originally from Seoul, South Korea.
Rebecca Abbott
Rebecca Abbot is a PhD candidate in the Sociology department of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Rebecca's areas of research are primarily focused on economic policy, inequality, racial attitudes and group violence. Rebecca's dissertation works on improving models forecasting mass atrocities using random forests, clustering and neural networks.
Richard Shafranek
Richard Shafranek is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. His research, which has appeared in Political Behavior, Political Communication, Political Psychology, and Weather, Climate, and Society, focuses on partisanship and polarization in American politics. Prior to graduate school, he worked as a market researcher, a political campaign operative, and in the non-profit sector, and was a Fulbright scholar to Indonesia (2011-12). He received a B.A. in Political Science from Allegheny College in 2010.
Subhayan Mukerjee
Subhayan Mukerjee is a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania, where he researches political communication with a focus on online audiences and online political polarization. In his dissertation, he is studying the structure of online audience networks in India, and theorizing the manner in which audiences navigate cultural divides in India’s uniquely multi-cultural society. His general interest in using computational techniques to answer questions of substantive social import stems from his early childhood fascination with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and the fictitious science of psychohistory. In his spare time, he can either be found cooking or supporting Arsenal football club with an aching in his heart.
Tomoko Okada
Tomoko Okada is a PhD candidate in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her areas of research interest lie in the intersection of science communication and political communication. She is especially interested in rural-urban divides in values about science and emerging technologies and unequal access to scientific news. In her dissertation, she explores these issues by combining survey data, text data of newspapers, and Twitter data.