Currently, I'm a Senior UX Researcher at YouTube/Google in the Bay Area, pursuing a passion for product development. Before this, I completed a Ph.D. at the Berkeley School of Information, winning the iSchools Doctoral Dissertation Award for my thesis, Emotion in Social Media. Prior to my Ph.D., I worked at Google in D.C., and my bachelor's degree in Public Policy is from Stanford. I love to think about design and its human consequences. Email me.
PROJECTS
My dissertation, Emotion in Social Media, looks at issues of emotional experience and expression in social media, and examines the use of social media ‘Big Data’ to make inferences about emotional life. I am founding director of the Center for Technology, Society & Policy, a new research institution within the School of Information, now more than 5 years old. During my Ph.D., I also completed a study of graduate student well-being at Berkeley, which was covered in Bloomberg, Quartz, and The Chronicle of Higher Education and was later expanded to all ten University of California campuses. My dissertation research was funded in part by the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity, and my thesis advisor was Steven Weber. To stay balanced, I sing and swim.
Much of my prior work experience is listed on LinkedIn.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- People Tend to Wind Down, Not Up, When They Browse Social Media. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 2, No. CSCW. November, 2018.
- Emotion in Social Media (Doctoral dissertation). University of California, Berkeley. May 12, 2017.
- Reassessing the Facebook Experiment: Critical Thinking About the Validity of Big Data Research. Information, Communication & Society. 2016. (Postprint manuscript.)
- Graduate Student Happiness & Well-Being Report. Graduate Assembly of the University of California, Berkeley. April 22, 2015.
- Visualizing Ambivalence: Showing What Mixed Feelings Look Like. In CHI 2013 Extended Abstracts, April 27-May 2, 2013, Paris, France. Related: MixedFeelings.us. With Bryan Rea and Steven Weber.
- Kinect in the Kitchen: Testing Depth Camera Interactions in Practical Home Environments. In CHI 2012 Extended Abstracts, May 5-10, 2012, Austin, TX.
PONDERINGS
- Please Can We Not Try to Rationalize Emoji. Medium, April 15, 2016.
- Rough Cuts on the Incredibly Interesting Implications of Facebook’s Reactions. Medium, February 24, 2016.
- Should Facebook Watch Out for Our Well-Being? Citizen Technologist, November 16, 2015.
- Why the Facebook Experiment is Lousy Social Science. Medium. August 28, 2014.
TEACHING
My advisor and I taught Applied Behavioral Economics together for three years, and I lectured, led class discussions and shaped the course design and syllabus (Fall 2013, Fall 2014, Fall 2015). In 2014, I also initiated a Research Track, aimed at helping Ph.D. and research-oriented Master's students gain more practice in designing and conducting independent research projects. I've also served as teaching assistant for Information Law & Policy (Fall 2012, Spring 2014) and Information Visualization & Presentation (Spring 2013).
SPEAKING
At the School of Information in April 2018, I gave my dissertation talk and discussed the implications of my research for the social and data sciences. (I am unfortunately out of breath for part of the talk due to my race uphill to get there.) I also spoke at CITRIS in January 2013 about how we might move beyond simple "approve" and "disapprove" measures of opinion and present the public's views with more of the nuance and complexity it has. Additionally, in October 2015, I was on the radio talking about how Americans were coming out in increasing numbers on Facebook.
SELECTED PH.D. COURSES
Research Topics in Human-Computer Interaction (CS 260) · User Interface Design & Development (INFO 213) · Computer-Mediated Communication (INFO 216) · Political Behavior (PS 261) · Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (CS 188) · Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship (IEOR 190A) · Quantitative Research Methods (INFO 271B) · Doctoral Research & Theory Workshop (INFO 294). I've also taken most of Berkeley's computer science core (CS 61A, 61B, 70).
