I’m an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah.

My research interests are in Crisis Informatics, Social Computing, and Network Science. Specifically, I study how people coordinate, self-organize, collectively problem-solve, and form communities online, especially in the high-tempo, high-risk environment of crisis. More broadly, I am interested in how social media platforms — as both complex and sociotechnical systems — affect and are affected by social behavior.

I completed my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder in Human Centered Computing under the advisement of Professor Leysia Palen. Then I spent a year and a half as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at University of New Mexico.

Before developing my interdisciplinary focus, I studied Sociology at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and worked as STEM education researcher at Ethnography & Evaluation Research.

I am currently supervising following PhD students:

• Di Wang
• Cole Polychronis
• Max Lisnic
• Khawar Murad Ahmed
• Thomas Greger