About Me
I am a PhD student, just now starting my second year, in Arizona State University's Department of Psychology and School of Complex Adaptive Systems. I work under Dr. Athena Aktipis and I apply network analysis methods to understand the dynamics of distributed cognition within sociotechnical systems, particulary those systems that characterized by safety-criticality.
In my undergraduate education at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, I studied the patterns of interaction between individuals over the course of emergency evacuations. I came out of that with a fascination for how high-consequence, out-of-the-ordinart information is detected and transmitted through networks of people, and after graduating I spent a year working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency on disaster preparedness and response through the AmeriCorps FEMA Corps program to look at that process from a different vantage. I am now pursuing my PhD at the intersection of social psychology and complex systems science to more fully understand these dynamics and, ultimately, monitor and design the instantiations of these networks where the cost of poor transmission of anolmalous information is highest: human spaceflight.
Research
Current Focus
The control room has always had so much aura, hasn't it? To think of the term conjures up images of hard-nosed operators staring intently at instruments, shouting out to the room as readouts change while the next layer up listens and consolidates and responds somehow in kind. These wonderful complexes of people and their tools, working as a unit to maintain and execute actions within an environment conducive to the accomplishment of larger shared objectives, are systems of distributed cognition--that is to say, they are structures that process information in their own right above and beyond that which is processed by their constituent parts. They are an example par excellence of our human capacity for collectively leveraging sociality, tools, and environment to smooth and extend how we act with agency in the world around us. My research focuses on these complexes in safety-critical domains and asks how the layered network structures that comprise them function effectively--or ineffectively--when they are confronted with anomalous information.
Ongoing Work
- Field work measuring physiological entrainment and collective flow in a different but no less romantic sociotechnical system--bluegrass jam sessions.
- Finishing up a paper documenting the results of one of the Cooperative Futures Institute's first Cooperation Benchmarks, measuring effective division of labor.
- *tinkering... tinkering... bespoke graduate research agenda based off Current Focus loading...*