Biography

Welcome to my site! I’m an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, where I teach data science in the MS in Data Science for Public Policy and am affiliated with the Massive Data Institute and Department of Sociology. I’m also a 2020-2021 Access to Justice Faculty Scholar with the American Bar Foundation, an academic affiliate with the federal Office of Evaluation Sciences, and a visiting Data Science Fellow with The Lab at DC.

My research studies how social service bureaucracies use a mix of data and discretion to decide who deserves help and focuses particularly on prioritization in K-12 schools. Substantively, I study how underfunded K-12 districts navigate three forces: legal mandates about categories of students to prioritize, fiscal realities, and family advocacy. Methodologically, I use a variety of methods, including tools from causal inference, computational text analysis, machine learning, interviews, and field experiments with large-scale administrative data. Other research focuses on prioritization in other areas of social policy, including rental housing, COVID-19 relief, and civil rights enforcement.

View my CV

Recent News:

• January 2023: I’ll be sharing research in progress at the following spring conferences. Hope to see some of you there!
  • Sociology of Education Association Annual Conference (Asimolar, CA February 2023)
  • Polarization Lab Annual Meeting (Stanford, CA March 2023)
  • Population Association of American Annual Meeting (New Orleans, LA April 2023)
• August 2022: I received a NAEd/Spencer postdoctoral fellowship to study how K-12 districts are deciding which students need high-dosage tutoring. Read more here.
• September 2021: I shared early results from a study that uses large-scale messaging data from an education technology app to study inequalities in family-school interactions before and during COVID-19 online pivots at the NYU Steinhardt Center for Practice and Research at the Intersection of Information, Society, and Methodology (PRIISM) seminar
• July 2021: My work with Dartmouth QSS students connecting data science coursework to efforts to improve labor rights enforcement was featured in this Dartmouth News Weekly article: Students Inspired by QSS as a Tool for Social Change