Experience

Career Journey

From postdoctoral research to associate professorship—a decade of translating data into impact.

Sep 2024 – Present

Associate Professor & Director of Graduate Studies

University of Oregon

  • Accomplishments include:
  • Built Power BI dashboards tracking 70+ PhD students across milestones; enabled proactive intervention and informed program policy decisions for 30 faculty within first year.
  • Transformed stakeholder frustrations into action through mixed-methods research (surveys, focus groups); developed KPIs and secured unanimous faculty vote on program improvements within 6 months.
  • Designed pulse surveys collecting peer feedback across 100 students in 25 teams using advanced Qualtrics logic (piping, embedded data, branching).
  • Mentored 13 early-career researchers through publication and career transitions; graduates placed in data science roles, graduate programs, and industry positions.
  • Received Tykeson Teaching Award (2025)—highest teaching honor at the university—for making complex statistical methods accessible through clear storytelling.
Jan 2015 – Present

Consulting Data Scientist

Self-employed (Clients include Stanford, WashU, Google)

  • Accomplishments include:
  • Designed survey infrastructure tracking 3,300+ families across 50+ waves; identified behavioral barriers to benefit uptake, informing Child Tax Credit policy within 12 months.
  • Built NLP pipeline (tidytext, stm) analyzing 6,500+ open-ended responses; uncovered unexpected pain points that influenced federal policy recommendations.
  • Created interactive dashboards enabling real-time trend tracking; findings directly informed U.S. Senate Finance Committee support for Child Tax Credit expansion.
  • Developed segmentation models revealing that a single "at-risk" designation masked distinct family profiles requiring different intervention strategies.
  • Executed end-to-end survey operations for 50+ waves of nationally representative data, managing design, deployment, monitoring, and backend extraction.
Jan 2019 – Sep 2024

Assistant Professor of Psychology

University of Oregon

  • Accomplishments include:
  • Managed $250K annual research budget across concurrent projects; secured $1.5M+ in competitive NIH and foundation funding as Co-I.
  • Applied NLP and network analysis to 700,000+ online health community posts; findings informed targeted communication strategies for patient advocacy organizations.
  • Published methodological guidelines on data transparency adopted by major psychology journals; established standards for documentation in preexisting datasets.
  • Identified curriculum gaps through student feedback analysis; implemented changes that increased course satisfaction ratings by 25% within one year.
  • Integrated automated data quality checks that reduced errors and enabled more reliable insights for strategic decision-making.
Jul 2017 – Dec 2018

Postdoctoral Fellow

Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine

  • Accomplishments include:
  • Led methodological coordination across 15 longitudinal datasets (49,000+ participants, 8 international teams); produced three major findings that changed understanding of healthy personalities.
  • Architected reproducible R pipeline infrastructure enabling distributed analysts to run harmonized analyses; increased project completion rates by 400% within 12 months.
  • Developed harmonization protocols ensuring comparable measures across heterogeneous datasets; designed analysis specifications accounting for dataset-specific confounds.
  • Diagnosed measurement problems in established instruments; revealed widely-used constructs were actually two distinct psychological processes, changing field assessment practices.
Aug 2012 – May 2017

Graduate Fellow

Washington University in St. Louis

  • Accomplishments include:
  • Designed and executed research on personality-health connections using large national datasets (Health and Retirement Study); published 9 peer-reviewed articles.
  • Developed advanced Qualtrics surveys with custom scripting (piping, branching, embedded data); reduced researcher burden by 100+ hours through automation.
  • Built and managed participant panels with automated triggers for multi-wave studies tracking 400+ participants over 4 years, ensuring high retention rates.
  • Developed dissertation methodology resolving contradictory findings in the literature by demonstrating measures conflated two distinct psychological constructs.

Education

Academic Background

2012 – 2017

PhD Psychology

Washington University in St. Louis

Thesis on Building a theory of adaptive neuroticism. Supervised by Prof Joshua Jackson.

Read Thesis
2008 – 2012

BA English & Psychology

Northwestern University

Expertise

Skills & Tools

Analytics & Programming

R (tidyverse, brms, stm)
Python & SQL
Power BI & Tableau

Research Methods

Survey Design & Qualtrics
NLP & Topic Modeling
A/B Testing & Causal Inference

Recognition

Awards & Honors

2025

Tykeson Teaching Award

University of Oregon

Highest teaching honor at the University; awarded to one faculty member in Natural Sciences each year.

2021

Rising Star Award

Association for Psychological Science

Recognizes outstanding psychological scientists in the earliest stages of their research careers.

2017

Rising Star Award

Association for Research in Personality

Recognizes emerging scholars making significant contributions to personality psychology.

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