Department of Sociology
Stony Brook University
Stony Brook, New York 11794-4356
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Biography
As a member of a Sociology department with a doctorate in Psychology, post-doctorate work in Political Science and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, I try to embody the best of what it means to be interdisciplinary in academia. In my work, I take advantage of massive data sets to re-examine what we think we know about human behavior. For example, I have collaborated with Facebook to conduct experiments regarding social norms around voting -- each experiment generating data from millions of participants. In another collaboration, my colleagues and I re-imagine and redefine Granovetter's "strength of weak ties" hypothesis by taking into account the work histories and social networks of millions of people around the world. Broadly, my research interests involve the application of computational social science to predict political, health and other social behaviors.