About Me
I’m an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, where I’m also affiliated with the Department of Information Science and a member of the Boulder NLP Group. Previously, I was a Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for AI and a postdoc at the Pioneer Centre for AI at the University of Copenhagen. I completed my PhD in Information Science at Cornell University, advised by David Mimno, and my master’s degree in Computational Linguistics at the University of Washington. I’ve also spent time at places like ETH Zürich, Microsoft Research FATE, Twitter Cortex, and Facebook Core Data Science.
Research Interests
I’m an NLP and cultural analytics researcher who works at the boundaries of computing, the humanities, and healthcare. I creatively re-use computational text methods in human, messy, high-stakes contexts, to study narratives, culture, and society.
Natural Language Processing. I build and evaluate NLP methods and tools, with particular attention to reliability, domain sensitivity, and the assumptions embedded in standard language modeling pipelines. Recently I’ve been interested in probes of pretraining data pipelines.
AI + Humanities. I frequently collaborate with humanities scholars to study narratives and cultural production at scale, with a focus on networked stories and poetry-as-data. I’m interested in how computational tools can serve interpretive, not just extractive, goals, and in what the humanities can teach AI research in return.
Narrative Medicine. I study healthcare experiences mediated through technology, from online birth stories to the role of AI scribes in clinical documentation. This has involved interdisciplinary collaborations with teams of clinicians and researchers at Microsoft, the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Hospital for Special Surgery in NYC, and other places.
Online Communities. I study how people use language to make sense of complex information in online spaces, from readers reworking genres on Goodreads to people navigating healthcare decisions on Reddit. I’ve worked in industry at Twitter on Birdwatch (now Community Notes) and at Facebook on Groups.
Science of Science. I study research communication and scholarly communities: how researchers use LLMs as tools and how writing conventions vary across research cultures. I spent two years on Ai2’s Semantic Scholar team, and I’m now building Lea, a social platform for researchers on ATProto.
Throughout this work, I pay close attention to data ethics, dataset auditing, and the downstream effects of pretraining pipelines, informed by a year on Microsoft Research’s FATE team.
Upcoming Travel & Talks
| Oct 2026 | Invited to speak at the NLP for Positive Impact Workshop at EMNLP in Budapest |
| Oct 2026 | Invited to speak at the Cultural Analytics Seminar at UC Berkeley |
| Jun 2026 | Invited to speak at the MAPS and FGVC Workshops at CVPR in Denver |
| Mar 2026 | Attending AtmosphereConf and ATScience in Vancouver |
| Mar 2026 | Invited to speak at the Language Technologies Institute Colloquium at Carnegie Mellon University |
| Mar 2026 | Invited to speak at the NLP Seminar at the University of Pittsburgh |
| Mar 2026 | Invited to speak at the Symposium on AI & Science at Cornell University |
| Feb 2026 | Selected to attend the Artificial Intelligence Humanities Sandpit hosted by UK Research and Innovation in Montreal |
| Dec 2025 | Invited to a seminar on digital literary history at the University of Copenhagen |
| Dec 2025 | Invited to a working group on the "Science of Stories" at the Santa Fe Institute |
Outreach
I was one of the lead organizers for AI for Humanists, a series of tutorials and workshops that guide interdisciplinary researchers in using large language models.
I’ve led or co-led sessions at ICWSM, FAccT, Bell Labs, and the popular NLP+CSS 201 tutorial series. I’ve also taught similar public-facing courses for the Hertie School in Berlin, the Brown Institute at Columbia, and the IDEAS Summer School at Northeastern.
I’m the lead builder and maintainer for some cultural analytics tools:
- Little Mallet Wrapper (a Python wrapper around the topic modeling library MALLET)
- Riveter (a tool to measure connotation frames via verb lexicons)
Media
- Featured on the Women in AI Research Podcast
- Interviewed by Chris Potts (Stanford NLP) on his podcast about NLP, novels, the digital humanities, Ukraine, and more
- Featured on the Diaries of Social Data Research podcast by Katherine Keith and Lucy Li about my work modeling birth stories
- Interviewed by the University of Notre Dame about my career path from the humanities
Service
I’m currently serving as an Editorial Board Member for the Journal of Cultural Analytics, Advisory Board Member and Guest Editor for the Computational Humanities Research (CHR) Journal, Advisory Board Member for the Anthology of Computers and the Humanities, and member of the Working Group on AI and Research as part of the MLA Task Force on AI in Research and Teaching.
I regularly serve as a (Senior) Area Chair for ACL and related NLP conferences like COLM, and FAccT, and I often review for TACL, the Workshop on Narrative Understanding, and other venues. I’m currently serving as a Tutorials Co-Chair for IC2S2 (2026) and the Publicity Chair for FAccT (2026). Previously I also served as the Publicity Chair for FAccT (2025), a Workshops Co-Chair for ICWSM (2024), and an Ethics Co-Chair for NAACL (2024, 2025).
Teaching
Spring 2026: Introduction to NLP (University of Colorado Boulder, Computer Science)
Fall 2025: NLP for Cultural Analytics (University of Colorado Boulder, Computer Science)
Winter 2023: NLP for Cultural Analytics (University of Washington, Linguistics)