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Greetings,

I am an Assistant Professor of international affairs in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at Georgia Tech.

I have two primary research agendas. The first focuses on conflict forecasting where I utilize machine learning and other computational methods to derive probabilistic forecasts of large-scale political violence for all countries cross-nationally. Forecasts have included the change in battle related fatalities month to month, the absolute number of battle related fatalities, and the onset of civil war. This research has been graciously supported by the VIEWS (Violence and Early Warning System) project.

My second focus attempts to understand the ways in which emerging communications technologies, especially social media, influence group and individual behavior for political violence. Specifically, I focus on the potential for political radicalization within online communities, and under what conditions this radicalization spills over from online to offline spaces. I also seek to understand what kind of messaging has the greatest effect on violent behavior and have developed new methods to measure hateful and violent speech on social media.

My research has been published in leading journals and university presses in the field including the American Political Science Review, Political Analysis, Political Science Research and Methods, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Oxford University Press, as well as peer reviewed conference proceedings including Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the Association for Computational Linguistics.

I teach courses on quantitative research methods, as well as political violence at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.

I am actively seeking qualified Political Science, Computer Science, and Engineering graduate students, as well as exceptional undergraduates, to assist me on various research projects.

Please view my Publications page for recent examples of my research and see my CV for my professional contact information.

Aside from scholarly activities, I also enjoy the culinary arts, finding the perfect cup of coffee, heavy metal mosh pits, bodybuilding and powerlifting, classic cars, and baseball.