Bio

I am a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

I study ideological and belief change, computational social science, illegal markets, social networks, public opinion, and ideological polarization. 

The overarching questions driving my research agenda focus on how political and cultural belief systems change, and what effects they may have on individual and public behavior. I approach my research from a number of perspectives, such as how the American population is organized ideologically, what effects the network structures of ideology have on public opinion, and how perceptions of risk moderate the effect of reputations, which take the form of centralized repositories of public facing and accessible evaluations of prior transactions, in online, illegal, darknet drug markets. 

My methodological approach is computational. I engage with complex data, such as textual reviews of market transactions, and use advanced computational and mathematical methods to answer my research questions, including text analysis and network analysis.