Biography

I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Statistical Science at Duke University starting in September 2018. My research interests are in applications of statistics to complex data arising in social science, particularly those involving political polarization.

My work with my Ph.D. advisor Alexander Volfovsky and the Duke Polarization Lab has involved designing a large field experiment to reduce polarization by pairing Democrats and Republicans to have anonymous, online conversations. Current projects revolve around analyzing these conversations to identify what kind of conversation features cause depolarization, while disentangling causal interference from conversation partners and addressing the inherent high-dimensional nature of text data.

I also recently started a collaboration with Mike West and the company 84.51 to assist with retail forecasting at a large grocery store chain. This work involves developing methods to forecast jointly price, quantity, and revenue across 100s of products and multiple geographies based on planned discount strategies. Key methodological innovations focus on identifying when and how to use cross-product discount information (identifying complements and substitutes) and how to capture global (company-wide) and local (product- and store-specific) trends.

Prior to starting my Ph.D., I graduated from Carleton College with a B.A. in Economics and Statistics. I then worked as an analyst at Cornerstone Research for two years, helping to prepare expert testimony on civil litigation regarding financial regulation, anti-trust issues, and labor market discrimination. After that, I worked for Professor Steven Levitt as a Research Professional in the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago, assisting with research projects about early childhood education, campaign spending, and the psychology of perseverance.

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I will eventually move my old Wordpress site to this one, but for now you can find all of my old posts here.