Broadly, my research interests are in social network analysis, mathematical modeling of social systems, and computational statistics. My current research focuses on how personal networks vary across geographic and social space. This includes understanding what factors predict respondent precision of geographic locations, the extent to which individuals’ personal job search networks are multiplex in rural and urban environments, and how emergency contacts of individuals across the western U.S. are spatially distributed. I am also involved in a project using estimates of ties between geographic regions as a measure of social influence in the context of prenatal smoking. I have also done work examining how personal networks vary with age in both rural and urban settings.
Outside of the realm of networks and space, other research in which I have been involved includes the study of cohesion in subgroups within large-scale interpersonal networks, estimation of network structures in sampled data, and using formal statistical network models to infer characteristics about networks over time.