hello there! we’re glad you’re here.
why we are
Computational Social Science is an exciting new field of research, and we think it should be diverse and inclusive as it grows. Variation matters in more than just statistics! To this end, we provide links to resources, which are intended to support new and emerging CSS scholars currently underrepresented in the field. We also maintain a database of these scholars, which can be used for collaboration and networking, or for finding new voices to speak at conferences, on panels, and in workshop tutorials. These resources are compiled and updated by the CSS community. On each page, you will find a link to contribute suggestions or edits.
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who we are
Taylor W. Brown
Duke University + Meta, Inc.
Sociology
website
Taylor W Brown (she/her/they) recently earned a PhD in Sociology from Duke University, where she specialized in culture, computational methods, markets, and inequality. Previously, she earned an MSc in Evidence-based social intervention from University of Oxford. For her dissertation, Taylor investigated the persistence of gender disparity in creative professions. She has also co-authored work in online conversations (using Facebook data), cultural diffusion (using Google Trends data), and political polarization (using a Twitter bot experiment). Taylor is now a member of the Core Data Science team at Meta, where she serves as a researcher and engineer to develop methods for measuring social inequalities. She hopes in the future to continue work at the intersection of culture, inequality, and climate.
Naniette H. Colemen
University of California Berkeley
Sociology
website
Naniette H. Coleman is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of California Berkeley and UC National Laboratory Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Her work sits at the intersection of the sociology of culture and organizations and focuses on cybersecurity, surveillance, and privacy, examining how organizations assess risk, decisions, and respond to data breaches and organizational compliance with privacy laws.
Naniette holds a M.P.A with a specialization in Democracy, Politics, and Institutions from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, an M.A. in Economics and a B.A. in Communication from the University at Buffalo SUNY. A non traditional student, Naniette’s prior professional experience spans both government and academia.
Naniette is the recipient of numerous honors including the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award from the American Association of Colleges and Universities, a Presidential Management Fellowship, President's Lifetime Volunteer Service Award, Berkeley Chancellor’s Award for Public Service, SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence, is on the Board of Directors for ScienceCounts, and is the founder and lead organizer for SICSS Howard/Mathematica, the first SICSS at a historically black college or university.
Aidan Combs
Duke University
Sociology
website
Aidan Combs is a Ph.D. candidate in the sociology department at Duke University. Her research interests lie in social psychology and computational methodologies for data collection and analysis. Her dissertation focuses on identity processes in ambiguous or anonymous contexts—specifically, how people develop ideas about the identity of interaction partners when there is ambiguity, and how assumptions about identity affect interaction and interactional outcomes. She has experience developing and conducting field experiments using custom mobile apps and developing R packages to facilitate research with social psychological theories.
Tina Law
Northwestern University
Sociology
website
Tina Law (she/her) is a sociologist who studies race, inequality, and social change in U.S. cities. She examines the relationship between urban change and racial inequality, with an emphasis on identifying and measuring the social impacts of transformations in housing for racially minoritized residents. She also examines the relationship between social change and racial equity through research on racially minoritized residents’ use of rebellion and other informal strategies to foster political empowerment and self-determination. Her research primarily uses quantitative and computational methods, and she is keenly interested in developing new ways to use oral history, natural language processing, and network analysis to better understand urban inequality. Tina is currently completing her Ph.D. in sociology at Northwestern University (expected September 2022).
Guidance Mthwazi
University of Cape Town
Information Science
website
Guidance Mthwazi is a PhD Research Fellow in Information Systems (PhD IS) with the Department of Information Systems at the Faculty of Commerce, University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. His broader interests are in Information and Communication Technology enabled Development (ICT4D) and ICT governance in southern Africa. He examines in his current inquiry, the phenomenon of electronicgovernance and its influences on public service delivery (PSD). Guidance holds a Master of Commerce Degree in Information Systems and a Bachelor of Business Administration Degree in Computer and Management Information Systems. He also holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Higher Education studies.
Guidance is a recipient of the Hasso Plattner PhD Scholarship (HPI Germany) under which he conducts his Doctoral studies in collaboration with the UCT School of Information Technology (SIT); a Teaching and Research Assistant in the IS Department; an active professional member of both the Institute of Information Technology Professionals South Africa (IITPSA) and the Southern African Chapter of the Association for Information Systems (AISSAC) community
Ieke de Vries
Leiden University
Criminology
website
Dr. Ieke de Vries (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology at Leiden University, the Netherlands. She received her Ph.D. from Northeastern University (Boston, Massachusetts) and was previously appointed as an Assistant Professor in the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University (Tallahassee, Florida). Her research primarily examines the crime locations, victimizations, and networks associated with hard-to-observe crimes and understudied populations. To examine these interrelated themes, she combines computational methods with other qualitative and quantitative approaches. Her work has been supported by national and international fellowships, including a Research Fellowship from the National Institute of Justice in the U.S. Besides integrating a computational toolkit in her own research, she has also taught on computational statistics, programming in the social sciences, and a computational criminology.
Lindsay Young
University of Southern California
Communications
website
Dr. Lindsay Young (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Her works sits at the intersection of public health, social networks, and communication studies and focuses on the social contexts that contribute to and/or facilitate health disparities, access to critical health resources, and health behavior change in underserved, resource restricted populations. Her current research, supported by a NIH Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00), focuses on the online social and communicative contexts that affect HIV prevention engagement among young sexual and racial minority men. To these ends, she draws on a computational toolkit that includes stochastic network modeling, computer assisted textual analysis, and predictive modeling. Her work also draws on community based models of behavior change and social network theories of health behavior to design health interventions that privilege intrinsic structures and assets.
Katherine Zaslavsky
Cornell University
Sociology
website
Katherine Zaslavsky (she/they) is a PhD candidate in sociology at Cornell University. They use content analysis, experimental designs, and computational methods to explore the value of representation, how it translates into forms of capital, and how it functions as a medium of inequality and exploitation across the fields of media, politics, and economics. They have conducted and presented research internationally, with the generous support of several research grants. Katherine also contributes to community directed research as a member of Hate is a Virus, an organization that advocates for solidarity, decolonization, and abolition from within Asian American and Pacific Islander experiences. They have experience in teaching statistical methods, race and ethnicity, and social inequality, for which they have received recognition from Cornell's Department of Sociology and College of Arts and Sciences. In fall 2021, they are a Junior Visiting Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University.