I am a research director – social scientist, data scientist, community-engaged scholar, and administrator – and faculty member with 20+ years of experience teaching, leading, and managing research and data science teams.

I work as the Director of Equitable Analysis in The Equity Center at the University of Virginia working with an amazing collection of scholars and practitioners, community experts, and students to create analysis and tools in support of a more just and equitable region. I also teach in the Batten School of Leadership in Public Policy, focusing on data ethics, public interest technology, and equitable policy, and am an affiliated faculty with the School of Data Science.

I have been fortunate to engage in a wide variety of work – as a political science professor and quantitative scholar at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Virginia; as a data scientist engaged in applied work with the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service; as a consultant and leader creating UVA’s StatLab; as a library director building Research Data Services and the Social, Natural, and Engineering Sciences; and as a researcher bridging applied and academic interests with community partners and advocates.

And I’ve been grateful to find many generous and creative partners along the way who’ve invited me to be part of collaborative work, including:

  • The RVA Eviction Lab at VCU, building data tools to support activists and advocates fighting harmful evictions.
  • The Environmental Institute at UVA, working with an interdisciplinary team to translate science into data-rich decision support tools for the Eastern Shore of Virginia.
  • Community Policy, Analytics, and Strategy Lab (CommPAS), co-directing a community-oriented research initiative with Paul Martin in the Batten School of Public Policy,
  • The Global Policy Center’s Humanitarian Collaborative at UVA, working on predictive analytics for humanitarian goals,

My own work centers on action-based research, using the tools of data science to promote accountable governance, make visible racial and other social inequities, and impact public policy and movement building. More importantly, I hope I’m mentoring the incredible young people I get to work with at UVA to engage this work early in their careers.

Also, sometimes I play the mandolin, pretend I’m learning to play the banjo, and harbor a dream of joining a home-grown bluegrass band!

CV/Resume

Community-Engaged Projects

Some examples of recent community-oriented projects, done as part of the current Equity Center work and previous community work through the CommPAS Lab.

Charlottesville Equity Atlas

  • This site brings together our Charlottesville region focused work, much of which is referenced below.

Charlottesville Urban Heat Islands

  • Exploring the impact of rising temperatures and tree canopy on Charlottesville neighborhoods

Stepping Stones Report

  • The Stepping Stones Report is a long-standing report providing trend data for a selection of measures on the well-being of children and families in the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County.
  • In collaboration with the city of Charlottesville Department of Human Resources, and with contributions from from the 2023 Public Interest Data: Ethics & Practice class
  • The Supplemental Report provides racially disaggregated data for a subset of the original metrics

Virginia Evictors Catalog

  • The Virginia Evictor Catalog provides information about property owners, or their representatives, who have filed tenant evictions across the Commonwealth. It is intended to aid organizers, policy makers, policy advocates, and service providers by providing insight into who is responsible for the highest number of court-based evictions and eviction filings, and where they are happening.
  • In collaboration with the RVA Eviction Lab at VCU

Orange Dot Report 5.0: Family Self-Sufficiency in the Charlottesville Region

  • The latest Orange Dot Report, a locally-focused resource providing a detailed look at economic indicators that directly impact families across the greater Charlottesville region.
  • In collaboration with Network2work at Piedmont Virginia Community College

Charlottesville Region Climate Justice

  • A Climate Justice Mapping project to visually explore connections between systemic racism and the local disparate effects of climate change, and to identify specific opportunities for equitable climate planning
  • In collaboration with the Office of Sustainability and community partners, this work is highlighted in an upcoming exhibit with the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center

Report for TJPDC: Charlottesville and Albemarle Eviction Cases

  • Work to support a regional proposal for a Virginia Evictions Redution Pilot grant

Eastern Shore Climate Justice

  • Work towards a platform for the collaborative identification, collection, and dissemination of information about the disproportionate harm of environmental injustice on Virginia’s Eastern Shore
  • In collaboration with the Environmental Resilience Institute and resident leaders. This work is now part of a 5-year NSF Coastlines and People grant

Housing Justice in VA

  • Promoting housing justice in Virginia through development of a Housing Justice Atlas to investigate immediate risk and predict long term trends in housing instability
  • In collaboration with the RVA Eviction Lab and community partners in Richmond, Charlottesville, and the Commonwealth

Albemarle County Equity Profile

  • We worked with Albemarle County’s Office of Equity and Inclusion to create the first county equity profile, analyzing various conditions across demographic groups and geographic areas that contribute to well-being.
  • This work has spurred a new collaborative effort to create a region-wide equity profile.

Reading Outcomes and Equity in VA

  • We use Virginia Department of Education data on the state’s English Standards of Learning assessment to visually illuminate the significant gaps in reading proficiency rates in the Commonwealth – between Black students as compared to their White peers, between economically disadvantaged students as compared to their more fortunate classmates, and between Hispanic students as compared to their non-Hispanic peers. This work is in support of partners advocating for new standards and approaches to promoting literacy.

Charlottesville Regional Equity Dashboard

  • The Charlottesville Regional Equity Atlas project is a collaboration between the University of Virginia Library, the Equity Center, and the broader regional community to imagine and co-create a platform to combine, visualize, and make accessible data about local disparities.
  • Partially funded by an IMLS Community Catalyst grant

Cville Region COVID Equity: Shelter in Place Index

  • In response to COVID, we began partnering with the UVA Global Policy Center to organize, visualize, and share data about COVID crisis response to inform equitable recovery. This was a rapid effort to provide easily accessible measures sought and shared by community organizations and members.

Cville Region COVID Equity: Frontline Workers

  • Community-based advocates from the Equity Center Local Steering Committee, working with UVA’s President’s Council on Community-University Partnerships, proposed a Fair Treatment Charter for Frontline Workers outlining a comprehensive set of policies and practices. We supported their effort by providing an analysis of frontline workers in the region.

Outcomes in Disparities in Child Welfare

Charlottesville Policing: Temporary Detentions

  • Working with a local journalist with access to stop-and-frisk data from Charlottesville police acquired through FOIA requests by a local attorney, we built some visualizations to understand who police were detaining, where detentions occurred, and what reasons police provided.
  • Read the story we were supporting, Jordy Yager’s Determined to Be Free.

Charlottesville Region’s NGO Sector

  • An interactive resource to better understand the size, scope, and emphasis of our local NGO sector.

Teaching and Instruction

Current courses and past workshops, instructional blog posts, and other projects and materials created as educational resources.

Public Interest Data: Ethics & Practice

  • This course provide data science experience to students in service of equity and justice. We practice working collaboratively, openly, inclusively, and reproducibly, interrogating our work in an ongoing project to learn how we might use data science for liberation.
  • Spring 2023 class
  • Spring 2022 class

Imagining Equitable Policy

  • Over the course of the semester, we unpack the meaning of equity in policy, review methods of assessig for equity, and examine concrete policy decisions and domains through an equity lens. Through team-based projects focusing on policies targeted at the challenges faced by different populations and people, we generate concrete examples of what such a process could look like.
  • Fall 2022 class
  • Fall 2021 class

Data Visualization in R, Fall 2022

  • This short course is a 5-week introduction to the principles and tools of data visualization – we explore multiple approaches to understand, present and communicate about data – with some side trips into data wrangling and processing.
  • Fall 2022 class
  • Fall 2021 class

Analyis of UVA’s Ours to Shape Submissions

  • A multi-part example of text analysis in R
  • Examining the comments submitted to UVA’s new president’s Ours to Shape website.

RDS Workshops

  • Contributions to our UVA Library Data Workshop series
  • Including data wrangling, linear modeling, text as data (sentiment analysis, topic modeling, classification), survival analysis, matching methods, mulitiple imputation, cluster analysis, mixed-effects models, and multi-part data science series

Research Projects

More academically-oriented work

Confederate Memorials and Lynching

  • An empirical examination of the relationship between the historical occurrence of racial violence and Confederate memorializaitons.
  • Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
  • Co-authored with Kyshia Henderson, Samuel Powers, Jazmin L. Brown-Iannuzzi, and Sophie Trawalter

Predictive Analytics for Humanitarian Goals

  • Working to build and evaluate models of displacement that can be of use in humanitarian response.
  • Part of UVA’s Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy’s Global Policy Center, in partnership with Save the Children, International.

Voices for Equity

  • An ongoing research effort to record decades of thoughtful and bold calls for racial equity written by students, faculty, and staff at the University of Virginia, to analyze them for common themes, and to create an interactive library to advance the conversation.
  • A collaboration between the UVA Equity Center and the President’s Racial Equity Task Force.

Project First Gen +

  • Re-imagining UVA as a place where first generation and lower income students thrive
  • Working with first-gen and low-income students to create research and knowledge for advocacy and change.

The Public Presidency Project

  • Developing new ways for the public to engage political news, one that allows people to monitor the activities and attentions of government from a relatively high level, that encourages the consumption of information from multiple and varied sources, and that lowers the barriers to attentive citizenship in ways that reduce inequalities in time, education, and access.
  • In other words, using machine learning to promote collective civic capacity. Here’s an early presentation: https://datafordemocracy.github.io/engagingnews/index.html

Presidential Campaigns

  • My book (University of Illinois Press 2011) examines how citizens learn and use accountability standards during presidential campaigns.
    1. Hearing Campaign Appeals: The Accountability Implications of Campaign Tone. Political Communication 29: 64-85.
      1. Making a Connection: Repetition and Priming in Campaigns. Journal of Politics 70: 1142-1159.

Citizen Participation

  • Investigating the causes and consequences of citizen participation in electoral systems.
    1. Citizen Participation and Congressional Responsiveness: New Evidence for Why Participation Matters. Legislative Studies Quarterly 38: 59-82. With Paul Martin.
      1. Creating Constituencies: Presidential Campaigns, the Scope of Conflict, and Selective Mobilization. Political Behavior 34: 27-56. With Paul Martin.
        1. Gender Differences in Citizen-Level Democratic Citizenship: Evidence from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. IPSA 2000, MPSA 2001, CSES 2002. With Virginia Sapiro.

Social Capital

  • Examining the production of social capital and how social capital promotes policy accountability.
    1. The Third Face of Social Capital: How membership in Voluntary Associations Improves Policy Accountability. Political Research Quarterly 60: 192-201. With Paul Martin.
      1. Trusting and Joining: An Empirical Test of the Reciprocal Nature of Social Capital. Political Behavior 22: 267-291. With Paul Martin.

Demographic Analysis

Library Projects

Projects done on behalf of library units and initiatives.

RDS Dashboard

  • A dashboard describing the work of the UVA Library’s Research Data Services and Social, Natural, and Engineering Sciences teams.

Understanding Journal Use

  • To better understand usage patterns and costs of big deal journal packages, we’ve begun to analyze data on the number of articles downloaded from a given journal as well as metrics on the the number of articles published by UVA authors, the number of citations to a journal by UVA authors, and the the number of articles available via open-access.
  • Part of our prepration for the impending “big deal” negotiations.

Estimating Library Use with Network Logs

  • A pilot study using aggregated log data from wifi access points in library buildings to investigate the number of unique visitors to library spaces as well as the timing, duration, and characteristics of visitors.
  • And we’re using it now as background data in conversations about re-opening library spaces for the upcoming COVID fall.

Budget forecasting

  • Budget model forecasts to support library administration as we move to a responsibility-centered budget model.

DH Lightning talk: 2016 Presidential Debates