I was born and raised in Philly, and recently moved back after two decades to write a book about quantitative propaganda and the systems that benefit from it.

 

After graduating from Vassar and getting a PhD in Philosophy from CUNY Graduate Center, I moved from NYC to Chicago to study how the brain produces moral beliefs at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Then I moved to the middle of nowhere to work at Geisinger Health System, to learn data science and study how framing questions certain ways can trick the brain into landing on moral beliefs that don’t make a whole lot of sense. Then I moved a couple hours east of nowhere, kind of near Philly, and taught Franklin & Marshall College students how silly our brains and beliefs can be sometimes. In 2020, I moved back to NYC to study political disagreement on college campuses, soon learned there was a plague visiting town, and hid in my parents’ Philadelphia attic for six months with nothing to do but get good at data science.

 

Then I ran around some other East Coast cities doing data science on racial inequities in criminal justice and public health. I joined the Maryland Judiciary as a Senior Researcher, spent two years as Lead Data Scientist at Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, and now work for myself, helping individuals and small organizations with research, data science, and AI automation.

 

Somewhere in there, I completed postdoctoral fellowships in the neuroscience of moral judgment and the cognitive science of bioethics, then spent two years as a visiting professor in the Department of Psychology at Franklin & Marshall College. I’ve also published 12 peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals ranging from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, and published articles for broad audiences in Slate, The American Prospect, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

 

The book I’m writing about quantitative propaganda is called B(u)y the Numbers.