About

I am an Academic Affiliate in the Department of Sociology at the University of South Carolina, where I continue a longstanding research collaboration with Matthew E. Brashears. Our work together dates to the founding of Cornell's Social Science Research Laboratory and now includes research on collective problem solving and information change in networks of machine agents, latent diffusion, and error correction in adaptive search.

At Iron Light Public Affairs, I led behavioral science, experimental design, measurement, and applied research across political, advocacy, and public affairs engagements. The work included field and survey experiments, audience and message research, behavioral measurement, and the integration of quantitative, qualitative, and computational evidence into research and campaign decisions.

Clients included advocacy groups, foundations, nonprofits, and other organizations. A typical engagement involved an organization developing an initiative, a backer with a stake in its aims, and a separate partner responsible for digital activation. Research plans, measures, and findings therefore had to be coordinated across organizations with different responsibilities and interests.

Much of the work involved evaluating interventions in changing field environments, where observed outcomes could reflect several competing influences. I developed research designs and analyses suited to those conditions, with particular attention to what could reasonably be attributed to an intervention and what the available evidence left unresolved.

I also developed reusable analytical tools and research workflows, including systems that used large language models for coding, measurement, and analysis. My responsibilities included sourcing and managing research vendors in the United States and internationally, preparing requests for proposals, evaluating bids, selecting vendors, and overseeing work from data collection through reporting.

At Roku, I developed behavioral measurement and analytical infrastructure and conducted research across streaming, audience, platform, and organizational contexts. The work combined large-scale behavioral data with surveys, qualitative evidence, and other sources to investigate individual and population-level patterns. Some analyses drew on streaming data covering tens of millions of households.

I built measurement frameworks, behavioral taxonomies, segmentation methods, dashboards, and recurring analytical systems. These made it possible to examine patterns across data sources originally collected for different purposes, often with different units of observation and measurement limitations.

A central methodological problem was determining how concepts from behavioral research could be measured meaningfully in platform and organizational data. Observed actions could provide evidence of what people did without necessarily establishing why they did it. Combining behavioral traces with surveys and other evidence was therefore part of the research design, not simply an additional analytical step.

I also sourced and managed external research vendors for work in the United States and internationally, including preparing requests for proposals, evaluating bids, selecting vendors, and overseeing research delivery.

At Meta, I conducted behavioral and computational research involving randomized experiments, network modeling, measurement, and large-scale behavioral data. Research topics included civic participation, platform integrity, economic inequality, public-health behavior, and questions arising from emerging technologies and platform features.

One line of work used network structure to identify accounts likely to be operated by malicious actors, allowing human reviewers to concentrate their inspection on those accounts rather than examining profiles individually. Initial experiments suggested that the approach was promising, although the findings were preliminary. Other experiments examined gender and income disparities in marketplace behavior and how people's behavior and coping changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The work included survey and field research and collaborations with the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. These studies brought together experimental methods, computational analysis, and evidence from populations and social relationships that are difficult to observe outside large platforms.

The research required attention to the distinctive statistical and substantive problems of platform data, including dependence among observations, population heterogeneity, and the relationship between observed behavior and the constructs being measured.

I also managed qualitative and quantitative research vendors in the United States and internationally across a wide range of projects. I identified vendors, prepared requests for proposals, evaluated bids, and oversaw work from data collection through reporting.

I held a dual visiting appointment with Linköping University and Stockholm School of Economics through the Institute for Analytical Sociology. My research focused on diffusion, network structure, collective behavior, computational social science, and experimental methods. The fellowship ran through 2019, concurrent with my faculty appointment at the University of Kentucky, and included three months in residence in Sweden that spring.

The appointment included research using Swedish population-register data, public and invited research presentations, and mentoring doctoral students. It extended my work on how network structure and local interaction shape the movement of information and the emergence of collective outcomes.

At the University of Kentucky, I directed an independent research program investigating social networks, diffusion, communication, error, perception, coordination, and collective behavior. My research combined experiments with human participants, network analysis, and computational models to study how local interactions and individual decisions generate larger social and organizational patterns.

The program included federally supported human social-network experiments, computational studies of diffusion and problem solving, and theoretical work on information transmission and collective behavior. I published peer-reviewed research, collaborated with scholars across disciplines, mentored doctoral students, and presented research to academic and practitioner audiences.

I taught Negotiations and Conflict Resolution to undergraduate and MBA students. I also developed and taught Managing Social Networks, an undergraduate course on social network analysis in organizations, delivered in person and through a virtual laboratory. Both courses combined behavioral theory and quantitative methods with simulation-based instruction, including negotiation cases and hands-on network analysis assignments.

Through the Gatton College of Business and Economics, I co-designed and led workshops in Lexington in 2017 for Sealy executives and managers on using quantitative and organizational-network evidence to assess employee performance and engagement and to encourage innovation. I also contributed research expertise to projects conducted through university partnerships.

I entered Cornell's doctoral program in sociology in 2009 and moved to the doctoral program in management at the Johnson Graduate School of Management in 2011, with concentrations in organizational behavior and social networks. My doctoral research examined social networks, information transmission, error, and collective behavior through experimental, computational, and theoretical approaches. My dissertation, Error in Information Diffusion Processes, investigated how errors introduced during social transmission affect diffusion and collective outcomes. An Army Research Office Short-Term Innovative Research award to Matthew E. Brashears, “Testing the Effects of Error and Error Correction in Human Social Networks” ($49,918, 2014–2015), supported the dissertation experiments.

From 2010 to 2012, I co-founded the Cornell Department of Sociology's Social Science Research Laboratory with Matthew E. Brashears. We established its physical and technical infrastructure, acquired research equipment, developed participant recruitment and scheduling procedures, and integrated the laboratory with university research resources. During this period, I was a teaching assistant in the Department of Sociology for undergraduate statistics and Introduction to Sociology.

From 2012 to 2016, I managed operations for the Cornell Business Simulation Laboratory, which supported approximately five to ten behavioral studies per week. I supervised and trained undergraduate experimenters and managed participant recruitment, research protocols, scheduling, study administration, and quality control for experiments conducted under institutional review board oversight. During this period, I was also a teaching assistant at the Johnson School for Leadership in the Executive MBA program and Negotiations in the MBA and Executive MBA programs.

These responsibilities established a continuing part of my research practice: developing and maintaining the instruments and environments needed to investigate behavior. That experience began with physical laboratories and subsequently extended to computational models, measurement systems, and research software.

As a master's student in sociology, I worked as a graduate research assistant and managed the Department of Sociology's research laboratory. I supported faculty research in experimental social psychology and group processes and managed the operation of human-participant studies, including participant scheduling, session administration, and data collection.

Since 2016, alongside my academic and industry appointments, I have conducted independent consulting through Graystone Industries for companies, foundations, and nonprofit organizations. My work includes experimental research, organizational-network analysis, program evaluation, measurement development, and custom research systems.

For Boehringer Ingelheim, a global pharmaceutical company, I contributed to a randomized field experiment that used the company's email network to identify change agents and encourage participation in an internal program. In 2018 and 2019, I co-designed and led workshops for executives, managers, and practitioners on using quantitative and organizational-network data to assess employee performance and engagement and encourage innovation. In 2020, I co-led a workshop with the company's US human resources leadership team on developing an HR analytics center of excellence, followed by a written summary and recommended plan.

Other projects have involved reconstructing and analyzing organizational communication networks. For a national nonprofit, I built a network from more than 83,000 emails, classified subject lines algorithmically, and linked the communication data to a survey of individual traits. For Collaboration.Ai, a technology company specializing in network intelligence and collaborative problem-solving, I analyzed crowdsourcing data from a US Air Force program and recommended network measures for a Small Business Innovation Research Phase II proposal.

My work with Victorious, a search marketing agency, began with a survey-based organizational assessment in 2022 and continued with analyses of sales data and internal communication networks in 2024 and 2025.

For SAGE, a national nonprofit serving and advocating for LGBTQ+ older adults, I evaluated SAGE Table, a series of community meals intended to foster connections across generations. The research tested the event host toolkit, introduced two interventions, and included a post-event survey with 703 responses. The findings appeared in SAGE's report From Connections to Community.

For Parity.org, a nonprofit working to improve the representation of women and people of color in corporate leadership, I reviewed a proposed gender parity index and designed a replacement measure, which I released under an open license. The organization uses a modified version in its ParityINDEX, a tool for assessing workforce representation and employment outcomes.

I also conducted a randomized comprehension test of technical website copy for Parasoft, a company that develops automated software testing tools.

More recently, I worked with Lexandria, a nonprofit developing digital educational resources in history, civics, and the humanities. I served as research lead on a 2025 proposal to the John Templeton Foundation, reviewed the methodology of its Ideas Alignment Index, and conducted a psychometric audit of its Argos assessment through early 2026. The audit included developing a codebook, testing the assessment with simulated data, and establishing a scoring methodology.

Some engagements begin with a defined empirical question and existing data. Others require developing the instruments, measures, experimental environments, or software needed to investigate the question. I use AI-assisted development extensively for implementation, automation, and testing, while retaining responsibility for research design, validation, and interpretation.

Independent consulting also gives me room to develop computational research methods and systems beyond the requirements of individual projects.