I analyze how people behave collectively and competitively — using data, simulations, and math, across sports, politics, and markets.
A decade of on-ice altercations mapped as a social network. Who fights whom, and what does it reveal about team dynamics, deterrence, and the unwritten rules of hockey culture?
Visualizing game excitement and win probability swings across an NFL season. Which games were actually worth watching — and what does the data say about how football is played?
Research and interactive work on homophily, the median voter, and how social sorting shapes political discourse — including a simulation game exploring how campaigns navigate coalitions.
I grew up in Buffalo and studied Psychology at Yale, where I also rowed varsity crew. After college I landed at an under-the-radar e-commerce company called CSN Stores, cutting my data teeth optimizing paid search campaigns and pioneering their approach to clickstream analytics, while the company rebranded into the e-commerce giant now known as Wayfair. I went back to graduate school to apply those skills to the social science puzzles I'd encountered as an undergrad, finishing a PhD in Sociology at Cornell with a dissertation on, of all things, the social dynamics of fighting in the National Hockey League.
After a postdoc at Dartmouth, I have returned to a career in data science and occasionally teach a course in social network analysis at Georgetown. Outside work, I run marathons, play ice hockey, try to keep up with the Washington, D.C. live music scene, and make pilgrimages back to Western New York to watch the Bills.
How do technologies rise and fall together? Examining co-diffusion patterns on GitHub to understand which tools complement each other and which compete — with implications for how innovation spreads.
How do players build careers around fighting in a sport that's slowly eliminating it? Tracing the enforcer role across 15 years of NHL data to understand how deviant specializations achieve legitimacy.
Seven decades of NHL fights mapped as a social network. What emerges is a surprisingly structured system of informal enforcement — with implications for how communities regulate themselves without formal rules.
Why do online communities sort themselves into echo chambers? A model of how cognitive biases interact with network structure to drive polarization in public discourse.
The median voter theorem predicts convergence — so why does polarization persist? Bringing abstention into the model changes the math, and the predictions, considerably.