I am the Associate Vice Provost for Data Science at the University of Pittsburgh and hold the William S. Dietrich II Chair of Political Science. I am also the Director of the Pitt Disinformation Lab at the Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security, while also being an affiliate scholar in the Intelligent Systems Program at the School of Computing and Information. I helped to co-found and co-direct the BS in Computational Social Science that is jointly administered by the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at the School of Computing and Information. I am also an external research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo.
My work leverages the accelerating availability of computational tools and digitized text to analyze patterns of national security secrecy and oversight, international and intrastate violence, and changes in human rights over time. I work with the Violence Early Warning System (ViEWS) team at the Peace Research Institute Oslo and University of Uppsala. My most recent book, Democracy Declassified: The Secrecy Dilemma in National Security (Oxford University Press), explores the effectiveness of legislative oversight, freedom of information laws and the press in resolving the inherent contradiction between domestic accountability and private information in liberal states.