I am currently a PhD student in computer science at UMass Amherst working with Professor Hanna Wallach.

 

Background

• I graduated from Swarthmore College in 2006 with a degree in mathematics and linguistics.
  
• After college, I received a one-year Baggett research fellowship at the linguistics department at the University of Maryland, where I worked primarily with Professor Bill Idsardi in phonology.
  
• I worked for the Evaluation Systems group of Pearson Education constructing teacher certification examinations.
  
• In the summer of 2010, I received a research fellowship in the New Media Analytics and Development department at the Democratic National Committee.

 

Research Interests

My advisor, Hanna Wallach, is part of the new UMass Amherst Computational Social Science Initiative. We are working on using state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to help social scientists look at text data in a new way. I like to think that we are taking text data that social scientists may view as strictly qualitative (such as historical documents or interviews transcripts) and trying to discover underlying patterns using quantitative methods. I am particularly interested in questions relating to politics and governance. Statistical topic models are one of the main tools I've been using for this purpose.

 

Other Academic Activities

• I am currently the student coordinator for the spring 2011 UMass Computational Social Science Initiative lecture series. The lectures in this series have been incredibly interesting, and I would highly encourage you to attend if you are in the Amherst area on a Friday!
  
• I participate in the UMass Women in Computer Science mentoring program.
• I was the student assistant for the NIPS 2010 workshop "Computational Social Science and the Wisdom of Crowds".

 

Extracurricular Activities

• I am an assistant leader for Girl Scout Troop 60821 in New Haven, CT.
  
• I love to cook. I especially like to use local seasonal vegetables and to pickle, ferment and otherwise preserve things.
  
• I am an avid knitter. Socially-networked knitters can find me as knitandperl on Ravelry.