I’m a PhD candidate in Information Science at Cornell University, where I’m advised by Matthew Wilkens. My research lies at the intersection of natural language processing, healthcare, and gender.

Here are a few research directions I worked on and am currently excited about:

1. Evaluation of clinical QA models: After studying the integration of medical alerts within nurses workflows at NYC Health + Hospitals, I have been increasingly interested in evaluating clinical QA models in anticipation of their integration in electronic health record systems.

2. Large-scale analysis of patient needs in online health communities: I am tracing symptoms and treatment strategies in PCOS online communities; I have analyzed user needs and support strategies in endometriosis online communities, as well perceptions of ablation and excision surgery.

3. Interaction between gender and literature: I have conducted a randomized experiment with 3,000 participants to measure the causal effect of character gender on reader’s preferences. I have used stylometry to explore style and gender play in Terze Rime by Veronica Franco.

I strive to ground my work through the theoretical frameworks of ethics of care and studying up. I enjoy using a combination of quantitative - NLP, causal inference, statistical analysis - and qualitative methods - surveys, annotations, interviews.

For a more detailed description of my research projects peek below 👀

Sep 2024	Started my role as president of the Pelvic Pain Association at Cornell!
Sep 2024	Having a great time leading discussion sections for INFO 3350: Text mining for history and literature
Aug 2024	Paper Accepted for Publication in The Journal of Minimally Invasive Gynecology!
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

Research Timeline

I am currently working with Daye Kang to trace symptoms and treatment strategies in PCOS online health communities. We will then use these findings to provide recommendations for the design of self-tracking apps for PCOS patients.

Over the past year, I have designed a large-scale randomized survey experiment to measure the causal effect of character gender on reader preferences. Ian Lundberg, Matthew Wilkens, and I found that character gender has a minimal effect on readers’ preferences. These findings contradict a long standing belief in the publishing industry that men and boys are only interested in reading about people of the same gender identity. We are currently working on the paper detailing this project.

In the summer of 2023, under the guidance of Doctor Kristen Pepin, I expanded my previous work on endometriosis online communities by analyzing user sentiment toward mentions of excision or ablation surgery, as well as support type and topics most associated with each surgery. We presented this work at the 2023 global congress of the American Association of Gynecologic Laparoscopists (AAGL) and the findings have been published in the Journal of Minimally Invasive Gynecology.

As PiTech Impact Fellow, I have worked with NYC Health + Hospitals to better integrate medical alerts within nurses workflows. I evaluated whether the recent intervention had successfully decreased the number of overridden alerts, and interviewed nurses at NYC H+H facilities to draw design interventions that better support their work.

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 patients need greater empathy within clinical settings, easier access to appointments, more information on care pathways, and further support for their loved ones. 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. This work is currently under review.

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.