About Me

I am a computational social scientist. I acquired my PhD from the Computational Social Science Program at George Mason University’s Department of Computational and Data Sciences where I was also an instructor teaching Computing for Scientists within the department. I obtained my Bachelors of Arts in Anthropology along with a minor in Middle Eastern Studies from University of Maryland, College Park and my Masters of Interdisciplinary Studies with a concentration on Computational Social Science from George Mason University.

My PhD dissertation was focused on developing an agent-based model of Göbekli Tepe and earliest Neolithic communities and conducted various social network analyses to examine patterns of hunting vs. gathering, building trust and cooperation, belief propagation, and development of universal narratives. My dissertation committee members were Dr. Robert Axtell, Dr. William Kennedy, Dr. Andrew Crooks, Dr. Hamdi Kavak, and Dr. Daniel Rogers.

Previously, I have utilized agent-based modeling to develop an urban environment and the analyze the interactions of gentrification, urban growth, urban sprawl, and urban shrinkage; built a cognitive model of a citizen deciding what to believe when encountering election stories on social media, eventually developing an opinion and using motivated reasoning to help determine which stories are true; and conducted ethnographical research on the social issue in West Baltimore.

I am very interested in the intersection of cultural anthropology, social psychology and computational modeling. My topics of interest are social complexity, group identity, social cohesion, culture change, cognitive behavior, opinion modeling, civic discourse, urban systems, inequality, information diffusion, and narrative formations. I generally employ agent-based modeling, social network analysis, cognitive modeling, natural language processing, and machine learning methods in my research.