Chapter 1. Undergraduate Gender Diversity and Direction of Scientific Research (with Ashley Wong) Can diversity lead to greater research focus on populations underrepresented in science? Diverse researchers can bring new questions and perspectives, but exposure to diversity may also inspire scientists, regardless of demographic identity, to pursue new topics. This...
Asymmetric relationships between creators and consumers in peer-produced knowledge repositories produce inequitable knowledge representation--or knowledge gaps. These gaps result in unequal access to information, and downstream technologies that leverage peer-produced data perpetuate these inequities. Effective knowledge gap identification represents a necessary first step towards equitable knowledge representation. However, while prior...
This dissertation contains three essays that study the operational challenges in healthcare-related fields. We strive to integrate analytical modeling and empirical methods to study decision-making under uncertainty for practice- and data-driven problems. We use large-scale datasets (millions) gathered from years of data collection. To gain access to these proprietary data,...
Regardless of where refugees are hosted, they require political knowledge of rights, restrictions, responsibilities, and the governance actors and processes who decide and uphold these. This knowledge enables refugees to comply with national laws, benefit from rights and protections, avoid rights-based exploitations and harms, and pursue life with dignity in...
This dissertation comprises three essays that study dynamic decisions under uncertainty--in particular, ambiguity. The first two chapters develop new decision models that emphasize the role of making statistical inferences in decisions. The third chapter highlights, in the context of persuasion, how different decision models can lead to distinct conclusions in...
Mixing by cutting-and-shuffling (like that for a deck of cards or a Rubik's cube) is a paradigm that has not been studied in detail even though it can be applied in a variety of situations including the mixing of granular materials. Mathematically, cutting- and-shuffling is described by piecewise isometries (PWIs),...
This dissertation contributes to the theory of segregation and methodologies to measure it. The first two chapters focus on the traditional problem of quantifying segregation in traditional survey data through segregation indices. Segregation indices describe the segregation of an environment with one number – usually from 0 to 1. The...
Having an Experience: Media Franchises, Events, & Participatory Culture explores, like its title suggests, what we mean when we talk about “having an experience” in today’s media culture. Traveling to an expanded network of sites where media fans are actively called to go out and “have an experience” in the...
While the scholarship on policing and surveillance suggests that police departments have and use a wide array of sophisticated tools, the literature has largely focused on only a handful of the largest departments. Moreover, these studies tend to be qualitative, so it is difficult to pinpoint what factors might be...
The commitment of resources to coaching almost always occurs in interaction with other district-wide efforts to improve instruction. Given this probable situation, it’s concerning that the field lacks the ability to provide guidance regarding how coaches might reasonably be integrated within overall plans for the coordination and improvement of instruction....