Resume

A Master’s graduate in Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis
My research used text-as-data methods to better understand the Supreme Court.
Expertise in research, statistics, data analytics, with an emphasis on machine learning, imbalanced data, and text-analysis.

A PDF version can be found here

Content

• Work Experience
• Research Experience
• Education
• Teaching Experience
• R Packages
• Skills
• References

Work Experience

Washington University in St. Louis - Weidenbaum Center | August 2024 - Present
Contract Statistical Data Analyst I

• Audited, cleaned, and updated existing data and code to ensure the accuracy of statistical findings.
• Standardized data across five related databases.
• Wrote supporting documentation, outlining the databases and procedures to follow in code replication.
• Developed data visualizations to communicate statistical analyses and enhance interpretation.

American Political Science Association | January 2023 - May 2024
Editorial Assistant

• Collaborated with authors to verify and validate replication code in R, Stata, and Python.
• Reviewed manuscripts for technical accuracy and consistency.

Washington University in St. Louis - Department of Political Science | August 2022 - May 2024
Assistant Instructor

• Instructed students in multiple courses about the importance of data, data analysis, and various political concepts.
• Assisted in teaching graduate and undergraduate political science courses in classes ranging from 10 to 100 students.
• Developed weekly assignments, problem sets, and exams to enhance student learning outcomes.
• Conducted a summer course focusing on applied statistical programming and data analysis using R.

Washington University in St. Louis - Department of Political Science | May 2022 - May 2024
Data Science Researcher

• Prepared, analyzed, and summarized survey data and statistical results.
• Managed and improved data processing workflows across multiple projects using Git.
• Combined various data sources into cohesive datasets for statistical analysis.
• Led a team of graduate students to develop an R package for multidimensional scaling across multiple datasets.
• Utilized OCR and LLMs to extract and validate information from PDFs, improving existing processes.
• Maintained databases of Twitter posts and comments using SQL.

Utah State University - Advancement Services | August 2018 - May 2024
Data Entry

• Updated records of gifts to the university and helped track donations across alumni using CRM software.
• Validated the accuracy of archived transcripts with a digital database.
• Collected and maintained biographical records of alumni using LexisNexis to find important events.

Research Experience

Washington University in St. Louis
Supreme Court Justices’ Accusations of Judicial Activism in Separate Opinions | 2023 - 2024

• Paper

• Classified Supreme Court Opinions using machine learning techniques (LLM fine-tuning, XGBoost) to measure the concept of judicial activism, remedying low classification performance through undersampling and threshold adjustment.

• Employed a two-stage selection model to account for selection bias when representing how justices use judicial activism in separate opinions.

• Coordinated and managed 7 undergraduate students in hand-labeling Supreme Court opinions.

Do Daughters Affect How Judges Interpret Law? | 2023

• Replication Code and Poster

• Accessed federal circuit court opinion text using Python to access the Caselaw Access Project’s API.

• Employed a Structural Topic Model to find when judges discussed first-hand accounts in case opinions.

• Utilized causal inference techniques through generalized full matching across judge and case-level characteristics.

Through the Grapevine: Socially Transmitted Information and Distorted Democracy | 2023
Research Assistant to Taylor Carlson

• Ensured the validity of results in the book by creating replication code files in R.
• Created figures using ggplot2 to convey the importance of socially transmitted information using survey data.

An Era of Minimal Exposure but Not-So-Minimal Effects? The Case of Fox News | 2023
Research Assistant to Taylor Carlson

• Managed a SQL database, making queries on a database with over 32 million Twitter posts.
• Complied relevant Comscore and YouGov survey data, along with web tracking data, and SVOD watching history, using R and tidyverse.
• Created reports using ggplot2 to represent how survey participants engage in Fox News across multiple data sources.

Improving Measures of Emotion in Judicial Text using Word Embeddings | 2023

• Replication Code and Poster

• Collected text of Supreme Court opinions by accessing the CourtListener API using Python.

• Utilized GLoVe word embeddings to measure how the cosine similarity of words in Supreme Court opinions relates to frequently used sentiment analysis dictionaries.

• Visualized similarities in legal language to positive and negative sentiment dictionaries using matplotlib.

Education

Washington University in St. Louis | May 2024
M.A. Political Science
Emphasis on Statistics and American Politics

Relevant Coursework:

• Game Theory
• Econometrics
• Statistical Modeling
• Machine Learning
• Bayesian Modeling
• Natural Language Processing
• Causal Inference
• Public Opinion

Utah State University | May 2021
B.A. Political Science, Minors in Statistics and Japanese

R Packages

• md2s: Multi-Dataset Multidimensional Scaling

Teaching Experience

Washington University in St. Louis

• R Course Instructor | January 2023
• Python Course Assistant Instructor | August 2023
• Math Modeling Assistant Instructor | August 2022 - December 2022

Skills

• Languages: Python, R, SQL, HTML

• Programs: Git, Tableau, CRM Software

• Statistical Analysis: Regression Analysis, Bayesian Modeling, Topic Modeling, Word Embeddings, LLMs, Sentiment Analysis, Text Classification, Causal Inference

References

• Available upon request