Computational sociologist & PhD candidate

PhD, Sociology

University of Washington

Seattle, WA

expected 2023 - 2018

Dissertation: “Expressions of Community: Understanding Variations in Community through LGBTQ Experiences.” (proposal defended June 2022)

Committee: Kate Stovel (chair), Jelani Ince, Kyle Crowder, Mako Hill

Comprehensive Exam: “Community: Origins, Processes, and Consequences.” Passed with distinction (June 2019) | reading list

Certificate: Special Concentration in Social Statistics (May 2019)

MA, Sociology

University of Washington

Seattle, WA

2018 - 2015

Thesis: “How Distinct is Gay Neighborhood Change? Patterns and Variation in Gayborhood Trajectories.” | full text

• Department of Sociology Outstanding Master’s Thesis (2019)
• Graduate School Distinguished Thesis Award in Social Sciences (2019)

Committee: Kate Stovel (chair), Emilio Zagheni

BA, Biology and Geophysical Sciences

University of Chicago

Chicago, IL

2013 - 2009

Minor: Gender and Sexuality Studies

Digital Traces of Sexualities: Understanding the Salience of Sexual Identity through Disclosure on Social Media

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2021

Gilroy, Connor and Ridhi Kashyap. Socius 7: 1–18. doi: 10.1177/23780231211029499

Measuring the Predictability of Life Outcomes with a Scientific Mass Collaboration

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2020

Salganik, Matthew J., Ian Lundberg, Alexander T. Kindel, [and 109 others, including Connor Gilroy]. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117(15):8398–8403. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1915006117

Humans in the Loop: Incorporating Expert and Crowdsourced Knowledge for Predictions using Social Survey Data

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2019

Filippova, Anna, Connor Gilroy, Ridhi Kashyap, Antje Kirchner, Allison C. Morgan, Kivan Polimis, Adaner Usmani, and Tong Wang. Socius 5: 1–15. doi: 10.1177/2378023118820157. (corresponding author)

How Distinct is Gay Neighborhood Change? Patterns and Variation in Gayborhood Trajectories

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Geography or Gemeinschaft? Disentangling the meaning of “community” through word embeddings

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Density, diversity, culture: How place characteristics shape individual sense of community for LGBTQ people

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Social Structure and Change in Public Opinion: The Case of Same-Sex Marriage

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With Katherine Stovel. Invited book chapter for Architecture of the Social, Peter Hedström and Petri Ylikoski, editors. draft submitted September 2016

Data Science intern

Meta

Seattle, WA

2022

• Analyzed feed engagement with reshared Facebook Groups content, presented insights to the Director of Data Science for Communities, built a data pipeline to create a new metric, reanalyzed a collection of experiments to quantify tradeoffs between types of content, and launched a new experiment to assess incremental value of reshared content (2022, Communities Ecosystem team)

Graduate Research Assistant

University of Washington

Seattle, WA

2021 - 2020

(with Zack Almquist)

• Text and network analysis of Twitter data from homeless care organizations | R, SQL
• Built a web crawler and a PostgreSQL database to scrape and store text data from nonprofit and government webpages | Python, SQL

User Experience Research Intern

Facebook

Seattle, WA

2021, 2020

• Designed, fielded, and analyzed a complex stratified survey of job seeker needs and satisfaction; wrote a widely-referenced technical guide to creating inverse probability weights for nonresponse using an internal Python tool; evaluated quality of an external vendor’s missing data imputation for a sensitive survey question (2021, Commerce Ecosystem team)
• Designed and conducted two studies (log data analysis with random forest models, behaviorally-targeted followup survey) of factors driving initial participation in new online communities (2020, Community Creation team)

Consultant, Survey Data Analysis

The World Bank Group

Washington, DC

2020

• Statistical modeling and visualization of gender-based disparities in Central Asia; wrote reproducible R pipeline for updating reports with new waves of survey data (with Stephen Winkler, supervisor Audrey Sacks) | story based on analysis

Graduate Research Assistant

University of Washington

Seattle, WA

2018 - 2015

• Agent-based network models of public opinion change (with Katherine Stovel)

Instructor

University of Washington

Seattle, WA

N/A

• SOC 225: Data and Society (2018, 2019) | syllabus, lab materials

Graduate Teaching Assistant

University of Washington

Seattle, WA

N/A

Undergraduate:

• SOC 316: Sociological Theory (2019)
• SOC 225: Data and Society (2018)
• SOC 401 A: Data Science and Population Processes (2017)
• SOC 351: Intimate Relationships (2016)

Graduate:

• SOC 504, 505, 506: Social Statistics (2019-2020, 2022-2023)
• CSSS 564: Bayesian Statistics for the Social Sciences
  (2018, 2019) | lab materials

Workshops and lectures

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• Instructor (with Sandeep Soni), Comparing Word Embedding Models
  NLP+CSS 201 Tutorials (2021) | materials, recording
• Instructor, Workshop on Word Embeddings for the Social Sciences
  Computational Social Science reading group, Sociologists of Digital Things
  (2021) | materials
• Guest Lecturer, Demography and Data Science
  CSSS 563: Statistical Demography (Instructor: Adrian Raftery), University of Washington
  (2020, 2021) | lecture materials, lab materials
• Instructor, Introduction to tidycensus (with Neal Marquez)
  Computational Demography Working Group, Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, University of Washington
  (2020) | materials
• Organizer, Seattle partner location for the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS-Seattle) (with Bernease Herman)
  eScience Institute, University of Washington
  (2018) | website
• Facilitator, IUSSP Training workshop on Social Media, Big Data and Digital Demography (with Emilio Zagheni)
  Side meeting at the International Population Conference, Cape Town
  (2017) | materials

Quality Assurance

Epic Systems Corporation

Verona, WI

2015 - 2013

• Automated and manual software testing

Density, Diversity, Culture: How Place Characteristics Shape Individual Sense of Community for LGBTQ People

Annual Meeting of the American
Sociological Association

Los Angeles, CA

2022

Community and Urban Sociology Section Section, “Queer Placemaking Beyond the Gayborhood”

Geography or Gemeinschaft? Disentangling the Meaning of “Community” through Word Embeddings

Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association

Virtual

2021

Sociology of Culture Section Roundtable Session, “Meaning and Metaphor”

Digital Traces of Sexualities: How Patterns of Social Media Disclosure Can Extend the Demography of Sexuality

Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association

New York, NY

2019

Regular session, “Sexualities I: Measuring Continuity and Change in Sexualities”

How Distinct is Gay Neighborhood Change? Patterns and Variation in Gayborhood Trajectories

Annual Meeting of the American
Sociological Association

Philadelphia, PA

2018

Special session on “The Social and Cultural Construction of Places”

Power in the Pipeline? Queer Accountability and the Ethics of Data Processing

ASA Sexualities Section Preconference

Philadelphia, PA

2018

“Methodologically Queer” panel

Extending the Demography of Sexuality with Digital Trace Data

Population Association of America Annual Meeting

Denver, CO

2018

Session on Families, Social Media, and Technology

Social Movement Framing in the Media: The Case of Recent Anti-LGBT Legislation in the United States

Annual Meeting of the American
Sociological Association

Montréal, QC, Canada

2017

Sociology of Sexualities Roundtable Session