I am a computational social scientist. My work focuses on questions of public involvement and engagement in environmental decision making. In my research I explore two related themes – how the structure and dynamics of inter-organizational networks affect policy change, and how the structure and dynamics of belief networks affect behavioral change. Substantively, I study how people try to bring about societal change in response to political and environmental concerns. Methodologically, the need to grapple with these often complex phenomena requires the use and development of techniques for handling large, dynamic, and relational datasets.

I gained my PhD in Sociology in 2012 from the University of California, Irvine. I worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Davis and then at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center at the University of Maryland before joining the Department of Politics at Exeter in 2015.