Can you tell us a little about yourself?

I’m joining VNL as I wrap up my graduate training in Public Health from the University of Nevada, Reno. For the past 4 years, I’ve been part of a team focusing on how social networks can both help and hamper efforts to minimize risks around health topics such as HIV transmission or opioid overdose. Before that, I worked in a variety of settings using data and research methods to address other important issues, including promoting religious tolerance and understanding the impacts of traumatic brain injury, as two examples.

What is your new position and what do you hope to accomplish in it?

In my role as a Network Research Scientist at VNL, I’m contributing to the development of the PARTNERme platform. I hope to continue building and strengthening this tool so that it can more fully capture the complexity and nuance of interpersonal networks. I hope that people using the platform gain insights about themselves and their relationships, and that folks can use these insights to leverage their personal networks for the better.

Who is a significant mentor in your life?

My undergraduate mentor, Dr. Dawn Robinson, is a Sociologist at the University of Georgia and she introduced me to networks as both a theory and a method for understanding the social world. In working with her, I learned there was a whole field of network scientists studying things we all intuitively understand to be true (e.g., birds of a feather flock together).

Having a networks perspective has transformed the way I think about my own personal relationships, but it has also helped me understand broader societal issues–things like health, poverty, racism, crime–as network-level and systems-level issues. Solutions to these problems, therefore, also require a networks approach. It’s not enough to have a good idea–you’ve also got to get that idea to spread through communication, coordination, and relationship building. In other words, we need to build, strengthen, and exploit features of social networks to solve society’s most pressing matters.

Where is your favorite place to visit on vacation?

One of the coolest places I’ve visited is Fern Canyon in northern California. It’s a hike where you’re walking in a narrow canyon that’s also a river bed and the walls of the canyon on either side (roughly 50ft high) are completely covered in lush green ferns. It felt like being in an otherworldly place like Middle Earth or Narnia. More generally, I like to visit universities and breweries anytime I travel. For me, these settings can be both familiar/comfortable and unique/interesting. 

(See below–for scale, I’m in the lower corner of the left pic!)