Hello and welcome! A little about me: I earned my doctorate in Computational Social Science from George Mason University with a dissertation on economic policy and population-scale data analysis of Internal Revenue Service records. I studied the population of U.S. firms from a mathematical perspective, inspired from the study of vertebrate biological communities or biological societies in general – survival analysis mainly. However, my initial training and experience are in social network analysis.
More recently I served as an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellow supporting research of interest to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) within the Department of Computational and Data Sciences at George Mason University and am now an MDI Postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University’s Massive Data Institute in the McCourt School of Public Policy .
My research area is focused on changing systems at the intersection of social network analysis and agent-based modeling with use-inspired computational models (more on that below and in the Research page).
Finishing pre-college early, I earned my undergraduate degree in Engineering: Physics. My interests then were electrical engineering-focused, but also moonlighted as a research assistant working on understanding the properties of inductively-coupled plasma sources. I was also a lab teaching assistant for physics, chemistry, and astronomy courses. If we count from my graduation date in 2003 to 2021, I have roughly 15 years of professional and academic experience in very diverse domains – about half of that was spent full-time in academia.
Back in 2015, I was selected for a U.S. State Department-funded assignment with the NATO STRATCOM Centre of Excellence where I conducted large scale analysis of social media data and provided policy recommendations in the fight against ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. Most of my policy recommendations were implemented globally and were later used as a basis for the development of an information operations doctrine in various countries. Since then, I’ve been asked to serve as a formal or informal advisor to various organizations on Information and Social Media Warfare–a term closely associated with my 2015 NATO report.
In the recent past I’ve also worked on a few fun projects – one I’m very proud of is a project with my undergraduate students where we simulated an online dating application with state-of-the-art modeling techniques and validated a design intervention using an appropriate statistical model. This was a great project. What was rewarding about this project was getting to work with the next generation of scholars on a project that spanned agent-based modeling, social network analysis, network science, sociology, economics, demography, and game theory and then having our work published in the public domain at a good engineering journal.
I have been truly privileged to receive my formal training with many world-renowned leaders in social network analysis, network science, complex systems, and agent-based modeling – some formally (mentor-mentee) and some informally (teacher-student). Exposure to great ideas through them and the literature they directed my attention to has really shaped my natural intellectual instinct and helped me create a unique and independent research platform which I’m pursuing at the moment. Sometimes that research platform is not obvious to someone who’s never talked to me so let me explain, and of course, you can always visit the Research page for details:
Methodologically, my research and applied work utilizes methods at the intersection of networks, agents, and systems, but I do not necessarily specialize in a well-defined classical field such as physics, political science, mathematics, sociology and so on. My research focus can be better framed as an intervention-focused use-inspired research and development. My interest is somewhat in how (human) systems change given some stimuli. I guess you can say that that’s just control theory with a twist, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but since my research area is so young (10-20 years) in application to human systems it might be too early to pin this research area into the domain of engineering/control theory just yet, especially when there’s so much science that’s still being done in the field.
If you’d like to learn a little more, please visit the Research page of this website.
Finally, as service towards informing the public, I’ve made appearances on CNN HLN, FOX NEWS, NBC News, Entrepreneur Magazine and I’ve been invited to participate in the 2021 Heidelberg Laureate Forum (Heidelberg, Germany) where I will collaborate with fellow scholars of the mathematical and computer sciences as well as Fields Medal, Abel Prize, Turing Award, and Nevanlinna prize winners.
For a copy of my CV, please click here.