Executive Director and Senior Research Scientist at the Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University.

I am interested in human social, group and political behaviour. I apply techniques from mathematical modelling and data science to this topic. I have done work identifying clusters of people on Twitter and understanding their language use. I have developed ways of sampling groups on Twitter and characterising them automatically. This can have great value for tracking social/political groups, understanding their dynamics, and targeting members of those groups.

I come from an academic background working in Computer Science and Mathematical Biology fields. I’ve studied social behaviour in a broad range of animals from slime mould, bees and aphids to online human behaviour on Twitter. This included studying how bee colonies are affected by stress from pesticides and other diseases. We showed how colonies subject to stress from pesticides can often be on a knife edge between growth and collapse.