About me

I am a PhD candidate in Network Science at Northeastern University. My current work focuses on the ways that structure and agency interact in social networks to encourage mobilization. I’m also interested in making big data and computational tools usable by academics without specialized technical training. I use mixed methods, ranging from terabyte-scale datasets to autoethnography, to make sense of the world.

My dissertation work

Structure, or the place one occupies in a social network, and agency, or an individual’s characteristics and proclivities, are thought to be the two main driving forces behind engagement in social movements. We can think of structure and agency as two separate, competing factors, or we can think of them as a duality: in much the same way that light is both a particle and a wave, the interplay of structure and agency is what governs mobilization.