I am the CCI Board of Visitors Assistant Professor in the School of Information Sciences in the College of Communication and Information at The University of Tennessee Knoxville. I am also a Joint Faculty Assistant Professor in The Bredesen Center's Data Science and Engineering program, a Founding Fellow of the CCI Information Integrity Institute, an Affiliate of the Center for National Security and Foreign Affairs at the Baker School for Public Policy and Public Affairs, and co-director of The MeLa Lab, a multi-university lab that works on problems related to online news and media.

I am a highly interdisciplinary, computational social scientist who takes a pragmatic approach to research. I study the production of, consumption of, and interventions to misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, rumors, and malign influence in media ecosystems.

This work fits into two related categories:

1. Content moderation and information interventions, ranging from automated detection techniques (or alternatives to automated techniques) to content warning label designs. I prioritize ethics, safety, and practicality over building narrowly accurate tools.​
Examples: BIT23, CACM22, ICWSM19a, TIST19

2. Media ecosystems, where media is defined broadly and can include news media, social media actors, and social media platforms. Importantly, I am not only referring to media consumption but also media production. For example, asking "what tactics does fringe news outlet X use to spread information?" is just as important as asking "how does fringe news outlet X change consumers' opinions?".
Examples: ICWSM22, ICWSM19b, Websci22, ICWSM24

In addition to this core work, I collaborate with social scientists to study the relationships between and influences of culture, identity, and experiences on opinions, with the long-term goal of using what is learned from this work to inform my work on media ecosystems and interventions.
Examples: HSSC23, SNSS24, CRESP23, AB23

I like to think about this work within what I call the "disinformation pipeline", where I study various facets of media, the humans who consume it, and interventions in between (shown in the Figure below). While I call this a "disinformation" pipeline, it can also be applied to other related terms, such as online influencers.