About
My work sits at the intersection of political behavior and digital media. I am on the faculty at UC Santa Barbara in the Department of Political Science, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Communication. I am also affiliated with the Center for Responsible Machine Learning.
The overarching theme of my research is how human behavior is affected by digital media. My current work examines democratically corrosive content in social media, using AI as an analytic tool, and comparative survey data from the US and Europe to understand relationships among media use, psychological traits, and anti-democratic sentiment.
I came to this work by an indirect path: an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Stanford, some years in Silicon Valley, a doctorate in political science from MIT, and a stint at RAND writing about education and technology policy. I have been on the faculty at UC Santa Barbara since the mid-1990s. I am a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and a Fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA), and a past Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.