The view from above

Over the past decade, my research projects and interests have spanned across several subject matter areas, with the common focus of system-level emergent behavior.

Past subjects of my research have included:

• climate modeling/analysis,
• power grid modeling,
• social networks,
• disaster-event communications,
• socio-cognitive modeling,
• global food systems,
• sentiment analysis, information theory, and NLP.

Background

I completed a B.S. in Physics, B.S. in Statistics, and M.S. in Complex Systems at the University of Vermont. Following this, I spent four years as a research scientist in the Applied Information Sciences Center at Sandia National Laboratories, researching electrical grid resilience, Bayesian inversion for climate models, and agent-based models of misinformation adoption.

In 2023, I left Sandia to pursue a PhD in Information Science at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where I currently reside. At CU, I work with Professor Brian Keegan, studying the online behavior of extremist groups to develop methods of predicting and preventing real-world attacks on marginalized communities.

Writing

Publications

• A. Naugle, D. Krofcheck, C. Warrender, K. Lakkaraju, L. Swiler, S. Verzi, B. F. Emery, J. Murdock, M. Bernard, and V. Romero, “What can simulation test beds teach us about social science? results of the ground truth program,” Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, pp. 1–22, 2022.
• C. C. Nicholson, B. F. Emery, and M. T. Niles, “Global relationships between crop diversity and nutritional stability,” Nature Communications, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 1–9, 2021.
• B. F. Emery, M. T. Niles, C. M. Danforth, and P. S. Dodds, “Local information sources received the most attention from Puerto Ricans during the aftermath of Hurricane Maria,” PLOS ONE, vol. 16, no. 6, p. e0251704, 2021.
• M. T. Niles, B. F. Emery, S. Wiltshire, M. E. Brown, B. Fisher, and T. H. Ricketts, “Climate impacts associated with reduced diet diversity in children across nineteen countries,” Environmental Research Letters, vol. 16, no. 1, p. 015010, 2021.
• M. T. Niles, B. F. Emery, A. J. Reagan, P. S. Dodds, and C. M. Danforth, “Social media usage patterns during natural hazards,” PLOS ONE, vol. 14, no. 2, p. e0210484, 2019.

White Papers

• A Model of Narrative Reinforcement on a Dual-Layer Social Network
• A Projected Network Model of Online Disinformation Cascades
• Sensitivity and Uncertainty Analysis of Generator Failures under Extreme Temperature Scenarios in Power Systems

Speaking

Some Deliveration Examples