About

I’m a social scientist who studies media with an eye on all of the stakeholders in an increasingly complex information economy: How do journalists do their work? What do people’s everyday information habits and relationships with new technologies look like? How do they learn about numbers and data? What kinds of policy solutions are being proposed to these questions?

These days, I’m the Senior Research Manager at the Center for News, Technology and Innovation, where I get to think about how journalists and the public interact with all kinds of new technologies, especially online platforms and LLMs.

Between 2017 and 2025, I led the research side of the Knology + PBS News Hour participatory action lab (a partnership between researchers and producers). That work ran the gamut: we listened to audiences using research methods from large-scale quantitative surveys to one-on-one think-alouds; we developed training with, and for, journalists; we ensured educational materials were aligned to standards; and we did everything in between.

At Knology, I was co-PI of three NSF-funded projects:

  • Partnerships for Indigenous Climate Journalism (2023-2028*) brought a third partner into the Knology-News Hour collaboration: Indigenous-led news outlet ICT. Our goals were to improve news reporting about Indigenous solutions to climate change via co-production that would bring together the complementary expertise of NewsHour and ICT. We completed a landscape study of climate reporting across the U.S. before the project was terminated in 2025 by DOGE.
  • Meaningful Math (2019-2024) developed better ways of reporting on statistics and data to support audience understanding. We analyzed hundreds of news stories across outlets; conducted A/B surveys with representative online samples of the US public; hosted focus groups to ask math-anxious audiences to work through difficult headlines and viz; and solicited ongoing feedback from experts in math and journalism education. We also created a reporting guide.
  • A conference to explore theories regarding how moral motives move people from STEM information learning to STEM-informed action (2021-2023) brought together researchers in the social scientists with informal learning practitioners (journalists, filmmakers, museum educators, and more). Our bilingual (English-Spanish) edited volume, Moral Motives and STEM-Informed Action included theoretical essays, reflections on practice, and dialogues between the two.