I’m the Executive Director of the NYU Center for Social Media & Politics, a computational research institute studying the ever-evolving relationship between the digital information environment and society. Below, I tell you why I do what I do. Here’s a snapshot of my public-facing work.
My sociotechnical work is animated by the belief that (on the one hand) public policy & private innovation should engage with rigorous evidence to support ethical technology development and that (on the other) research should prioritize pressing questions of public importance over esoteric academic questions. More specifically, I spend time across four areas:
I do research & manage research projects / teams. I use experimental and computational methods to study the diffusion of online information, the impact this information has on the public, and what interventions might make the digital information environment healthier. My earlier work mainly focused on social media & content moderation; recently, I’m focused on genAI and search engines. My research has been published in Nature, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, ICWSM, and the Journal of Online Trust & Safety, among other journals.
I translate technical research for other audiences — policymakers, civil society, and media — and translate their priorities for our research. My goal is to infuse empirical rigor into the tech policy questions of our day, as well as use policy questions align our research agenda with real-work impact. To this end, I speak regularly in public & private fora and have written for & been quoted in leading international outlets.
I help build networks across the tech policy field, with a particular focus on the technical & ethical questions for data collection & sharing. Highlights include leading research partnerships with tech companies and civil society organizations, managing two NSF-funded multi-stakeholder conference series, and organizing field-building events for multiple foundations.
I work to build sustainable and effective organizations. I've helped launch & run what is now a 20-person, multi-million dollar research center, leading the ground-up development of our operations, fundraising, finance, and people management functions. We’ve raised 8-figures to date, with grants from leading private and public funders. This work of building organizational capacity relied on my experiences, before coming to academia, in operations roles across both start-ups and non-profits.
Outside of NYU, I consult for an international NGO working on information integrity, am on the Research Advisory Council of the Siegel Family Endowment, and am on the advisory board of the start-up NewsGuard.
When I’m not working or consulting, I play a lot of basketball (was a good high school & mediocre Division I player), read a lot of fiction (which I sometimes write), and hang out with my dog.
