Research
[Senior Thesis] The History of a Graph: The STEM Gender-Equality Paradox and the People who Made it 📈
Written under the direction of Prof. Sepehr Vakil (SESP), this closely analyzed thesis exposes the faulty assumptions behind the “gender-equality paradox” in STEM/ICT education, which purports to find that more gender-equal countries have relatively fewer female students graduating in STEM/ICT fields than do countries with less gender equality. Using a mix of historical, ethnographic, and statistical techniques, the thesis situates the paradox in its social and political context, documenting its analytic and intellectual limits, and then uses IRB-approved interviews with Moroccan women who are pursuing a bachelor's degree in computer science to show how poorly the paradox matches their experiences.
See more: Read the full thesis. See the announcement for my thesis being a co-winner of the 2021 Science in Human Culture Essay Prize.
2020 Circumnavigator's Travel-Study Grant 🌍
Awarded $9,500 to conduct a global research project on the ICT Gender-Equality Paradox.
Though the trip was cancelled indefinitely due to the Coronavirus pandemic, I was awarded the chance to visit Morocco 🇲🇦, the UK 🇬🇧, France 🇫🇷, Estonia 🇪🇪, Qatar 🇶🇦, Singapore 🇸🇬, and New Zealand 🇳🇿 to conduct a comparative case studies interview and ethnography based research project about women in tech.
See more: You can read my accepted proposal here. Read more about my project on the Chicago Circumnavigators Club website. Lastly, check out my re-analysis of the ICT Gender-Equality Paradox.
Safe at Home? Investigating police invasions of Chicago homes in the aftermath of Breonna Taylor’s killing.
I worked on this project along with two others for Jennie Rogers' Fall 2020 Data Science seminar, for delivery to The Invisible Institute. To answer the question of if Chicagoans are safe at home, we used relational analytics, data visualization, interactive visualization, machine learning, and natural language processing. As a direct outcome of our project, The public Chicago Police Department database now includes data about warrants involved in allegations of misconduct.
See more: See our GitHub repository and final presentation.
Northwestern Social Media Lab 📱
I started working as a research assistant in the SML the summer after my freshman year and am forever grateful for the amazing people who introduced me to the world of research. I am trained in constructivist grounded theory qualitative coding and applied those skills to a project about transgender users of dating apps. I worked on other projects with the SML, such as classifying audience-reaching strategies on Facebook and serving as project manager of the final stages of a PhD candidate’s dissertation work on algorithmic folk theories.
Independent research project: Female Initiator Requirements in Dating Apps 👩❤️👨
With the guidance of Professor Jeremy Birnholtz, PhD, the rest of the Social Media Lab, and the generous monetary support of Northwestern's Office of Undergraduate Research, I was fortunate to have my first independent research experience as a sophomore. Using Qualtrics and Mechanical Turk, I conducted an online experiment to investigate the role that a female initiator Requirement (e.g., Bumble) plays in perceptions of users' dominance and affiliation. I analyzed my results in R and presented about this project at Northwestern's 2019 Undergraduate Research Expo.
See more: Read my final paper.
Winfred Hill Award for best final paper in Research Methods in Psychology 🏆
I was co-awarded the Winfred Hill Award for best final paper in Research Methods in Psychology out of all Northwestern students who took Research Methods in Psychology during the 2018-2019 school year.
See more: Though this was unofficial research and deviates from my normal research interests, this paper exemplifies my research and writing style.