I am an associate professor at the School of Computing and Information, University of Pittsburgh. I am also the Research & Academic Director at the Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security (Pitt Cyber). I am interested in studying social and political networks as well as ways to understand network data through computation and visualization. My work has primarily centered on large-scale community dynamics, high-dimensional (rich-context) social information summarization, and representation. I have used large amounts of social media data, anonymized cellphone records, surveys, and other mixed methods to understand how groups of people react to social and political events and exogenous shocks such as natural disasters. I lead the PITT Computational Social Dynamics Lab (PICSO LAB).
I am a computer scientist by training, and a computational social scientist working on questions like: "how would a society be informed?" "how do people share information, ideas and opinions in various contexts?" These questions have led me to explore analytical and computational techniques for mining heterogeneous, multi-relational, and semistructured data that can advance our understanding about structures in networked societies. I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University and College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University.