I'm an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University.  I received my Ph. D. in political science from Harvard University in 2012, and my B. A. in mathematics and political science from Creighton University in 2006.  

 

My research studies how word-of-mouth networks matter for politics.  Groups use social networks to share information, coordinate plans, and police behavior.  My research aims to learn which networks work best to do so and how this matters for outcomes such as ethnic conflict, refugee integration, insurgencies, social movements, and informal governance.  

 

My work draws on a variety of approaches, including game theory, original surveys, experiments, parametric and non-parametric statistical approaches, and agent-based models.  

 

My newest research (a collaboration with Janet Lewis funded by the National Science Foundation and UK International Development) studies spillovers in interventions seeking to warm attitudes towards refugees.  We find that in rural Uganda an intervention can warm attitudes in predictable ways in the short-term, but in the long term, spillovers through networks make things more complicated.  Interventions kick off a social process where people vet, deliberate, and update their views based on others in the village social network.  The first article from this project is published in the American Political Science Review.

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See the research page for more on this and my other projects. ​

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If you are looking to get started in networks research (or to teach others to do so), you may be interested in my newest book, a networks primer recently published by Cambridge University Press.  

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