I am Strategic Advisor to the Provost and Director of the Hub for AI and Data Science Leadership (HAIL) at the University of Pittsburgh and hold the William S. Dietrich II Chair of Political Science. I am also the Assistant Director of the Center for Research Computing and Data, co-Direct the Computational Social Science program, and am an affiliate scholar in the Intelligent Systems Program at the School of Computing and Information. I lead the Responsible Data Science, Complexity, and AI for Peace (RedSCAIP Lab) which is a collaboration with students to bring computing and social science together to solve societal challenges. I am also an external research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo.
My work leverages the accelerating availability of computational infrastructure, learning algorithms, and digitized text, maps, and networks to forecast political violence at policy-relevant scales and resolutions, understand how changes in technology influence human rights rights, model systems of national security secrecy and oversight, and analyze extreme altruistic acts. I work with the Violence Early Warning System (ViEWS) team at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. My work has been funded by several NSF grants as well as by the Hillman foundation, RK Mellon foundation, the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.