About me

I’m a PhD candidate in Information Science at Cornell University, where I’m advised by Matthew Wilkens. I leverage natural language processing (NLP) and qualitative methods to support patient-centered care, and measure the gender gap in fiction readership.

Recently, I have evaluated the information quality, empathy and actionability of GPT4 responses to endometriosis patient questions. Specifically, I compared GPT4 performance at answering endometriosis questions vs general medical questions, as well as across prompting strategies. Based on these findings, I am currently formulating preliminary recommendations for patients on how to use minimal prompts to receive more accurate responses from GPT-based tools.

Last summer, I expanded my previous work on endometriosis online communities by analyzing users’ perceptions of excision and ablation surgery under the added guidance of Doctor Kristen Pepin. Specifically, we analyzed user sentiment toward mentions of excision or ablation surgery, as well as support type and topics most associated with each surgery. Kristen and I then presented this work at the 2023 global congress of the American Association of Gynecologic Laparoscopists (AAGL).

As PiTech Impact Fellow, I have worked with NYC Health + Hospitals to better integrate medical alerts within nurses workflows. I evaluated whether the current alert management practices had successfully reduced nurses’ alert fatigue, and interviewed nurses at NYC H+H facilities to draw design interventions that better support their work. Here is an extended report on the outcomes of this project.

Before that, I’ve investigated patient needs and support strategies in endometriosis communities using Natural Language Processing on Reddit with Rosamond Thalken. We find that members request emotional support beyond biomedical knowledge and that they are attentive to the subject matter of posts when commenting. These communities provide support to patient populations that are missed by traditional endometriosis care. Here is the pre-print!

I have also collaborated with Marilyn Migiel and Giulia Andreoni, to identify the “Unknown Male Author” in Veronica Franco’s poetry collection Terze rime with machine learning.

Prior to joining Cornell, I’ve worked as a Research Assistant at the University of Bologna, Italy, with Angelo Di Iorio, Silvio Peroni, and Francesco Poggi. There, I examined the availability of open access bibliographic data for Italian publications across fields (published in QSS), and whether bibliometrics extracted from open access dataset can provide insights on the evaluation of academic researchers (published in Scientometrics).

I received a Master’s degree in Modern, Post-colonial and Comparative Literature at the University of Bologna, Italy, with a thesis on computational approaches to model urban space in science fiction literature. This work resulted in a publication on The Journal of Cultural Analytics.

News

Feb 2024	I passed my Candidacy exam! Here is a curated selection of my slide deck.
Nov 2023	Spoke on the main stage at AAGL 2023 about how endometriosis online communities and NLP can tell us how to improve care and reduce diagnostic wait times.
Oct 2023	Awarded $$$ in Microsoft Azure Credits through Cornell’s Center for Data Science for Enterprise & Society
Sep 2023	Attending Grace Hopper Celebration 2023 virtually.
Jul 2023	Working with NYC Health + Hospitals on the integration of medical alerts within nurses workflows to reduce fatigue as PiTech Fellow.
Jun 2023	Awarded the Outstanding Teaching Award for TAing for INFO 3370: Studying Social Inequality with Data Science taught by Ian Lundberg.
May 2023	Awarded the Siegel Family Endowment PiTech PhD Impact Fellowship.
May 2023	Selected to attend Grace Hopper Celebration 2023 virtually.
Apr 2023	Delivered a lecture on Nonparametric Estimators of Causal Effects.

_{Photo: Davide Tagazzini}