Hello!

I am a fourth-year PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Information, where I work with Professor Deirdre Mulligan to study how sociopolitical advocates respond to and employ technological and algorithmic tools. I am grateful that this work has been enriched by the Berkeley Empirical Legal Studies Fellowship and a summer internship with the Center for Democracy and Technology, and supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the Ford Predoctoral Fellowship.

Previously, I was the staff technologist at the ACLU of Massachusetts in Boston, where I worked on the Technology for Liberty Project directed by Kade Crockford. My role included exploring and visualizing government data in order to inform citizens about the effects of legislation and political leadership, managing our Data for Justice site, and generally supporting ACLUM campaigns that operate at the intersection of technology and civil liberties. I was also an affiliate of the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society for the 2021-22 and 2022-23 academic years.

Before joining the ACLU, I was a Research and Instrument Analyst for the J.W. Space Telescope mission at Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Originally from Hampton, VA, I received my B.S. from Yale in 2017, where I double-majored in astrophysics and African American studies.

My personal experience leaving astronomy and finding a career path applying quantitative analytic methods to social problems was far from straightforward -- for those interested in pursuing similar questions, I maintain a webpage of organizations, programs, and thinkers who work at the convergence of data/tech/computation and society/justice/ethics.

If you'd like to learn more, I invite you to listen to a civic technology podcast that I was a guest on in 2021 where I discuss my experiences as a Black woman in astronomy, my journey into public interest technology, and our data advocacy work at ACLU-MA:

I am immensely passionate about working towards equity and inclusion in all of the spaces that I occupy (and I do intend the original meaning of those terms, rather than the defanged meaning they often take on in modern professional settings).

Please feel welcome to contact me with any questions or inquiries!

P.S. Two of my favorite things are Wikipedia (hmm?) and Google Maps. I actively curate four maps with my recommendations for where to eat and what to do in the Bay Area, Boston, Baltimore, and NYC.