Hello! Welcome to my website.
About me
This is a work in progress (both the website and my research plan), so please bear with me. I am a first-year social psychology PhD student at Arizona State University studying under Dr. Athena Aktipis. During my undergraduate education I studied the dynamics between individuals during emergency evacuations, and following that I spent a year working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency on disaster preparation and response through the AmeriCorps FEMA Corps program. Now, after many years leading teams in the manufacturing sector, I have returned to academia to continue my research into the way disasters and other large-scale emergencies impact our behavior.
Research interests
Social Complexity
There is a lot we can learn by looking at large aggregations of humans—the classical "crowd"—as complex biological systems
Criticality
Large aggregations of organisms are subject to critical thresholds at which the character of their collective behavior changes
Adaptiveness
Many of these collective changes in behavior are functional, which is to say that they serve a specific adaptive purpose for those in the collective
Agent-Based Modeling
Computational modeling allows us to transpose these high-level processes into a format we can manipulate and study up close
Mission & goals
Mission: Science for our collective good and collective inspiration
- Use a complex adaptive systems approach to elucidate the large-scale patterns of behavior human crowds exhibit
- Develop high-fidelity computational models of these behaviors
- Apply the product of these efforts to improve our disaster preparedness and response
Background
These links are placeholders! Please stand by.