research

My guiding research objective is to understand the organizational communication that enables the development of safe and responsible technologies.

My dissertation project, Ethical Sensemaking in the AI Assemblage, examines how AI developers engage in collective sensemaking processes to co-construct ethics in AI systems.

I also study how technology-related trends are communicatively enacted in work contexts. I have contributed to projects theorizing the role of online communication as an occupational backstage in the absence of co-located organizing spaces for workers in the gig economy, and am currently working on examining risk and safety related discourses among gig workers in these online spaces. I have also studied membership negotiation processes among contractors and impression management discourses in response to mass layoffs in the tech industry.

Lab & Grant Work

Since 2022, I’ve managed the Virtual Identity, Community, and Entitativity (V.I.C.E.) Research Group headed by Dr. Anita Blanchard. The VICE lab is an interdisciplinary research initiative focused on understanding how groups and teams develop and maintain a sense of community and “groupy-ness” in digitally-mediated settings. As the Research Group Manager, I have supported experimental research projects, publishing, and undergraduate research mentorship.

Our current project, in partnership with Dr. Joe Allen and the Center for Meeting Effectiveness, seeks to understand how members of distributed scientific and technology research teams maintain group identification and entitativity during and between their virtual meetings. We have been awarded a multi-year grant for this research from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation.

Applied Research

In 2024, I worked with the UX Research and Education team at Aether - Microsoft’s internal advisory group for AI ethics research and engineering. I led a qualitative research project aimed at understanding employees’ strategies for bottom-up responsible AI advocacy.