I work in Cultural Analytics, an interdisciplinary field seeking to use computational and mathematical techniques to address questions about culture via cultural artifacts like text, art, and music. The majority of my work focuses on questions from the interdisciplinary field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR), such as locating the chorus of a given musical song or finding all copies of a particular recording of a song. I have also have research projects in text analysis, data science education, and projects related to health and health care. Broadly, I research the dimension reduction problem, representing high-dimensional and noisy sequential data as a low-dimensional object that encodes relevant information. If you are interested in pursuing research with me, please read my research page to see if the projects I am work on are of interest to you.

I am the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Statistical & Data Sciences at Smith College. From July 2016 through June 2018, I was a Data Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow, affiliated to the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University, with Björn Sandstede as my postdoctoral mentor. From September 2014 to June 2016, I was a visiting assistant professor in the MSCS Department at Macalester College with Chad Higdon-Topaz as my postdoctoral mentor. I was the founder and Principal Investigator for the Data Science TRAIn Lab.

I am passionate about teaching and learning. My teaching style relies on creating a low-risk, supervised learning environment and using a variety of collaborative and active learning techniques.

In May 2014, I defended my Ph.D. dissertation, titled Aligned Hierarchies of Sequential Data, in the Department of Mathematics at Dartmouth College. I am a student of Scott D. Pauls, and also worked with Michael A. Casey. I received my B.A. in Mathematics from Wellesley College in 2008 and my M.A. in Mathematics from Dartmouth in 2010.

I believe in participating in organizations and environments that encourage and support women in STEM fields, such as the Women in Machine Learning Workshop (WiML). In 2013 at a high-school in New Hampshire, I helped create LadyHack, a programming club comprised of motivated, female students.

I love attending hackathons, especially Music Hack Days. I am originally from Maryland, most recently from Minnesota (and Vermont before that). As a result, I am torn as to whether Old Bay, Maple syrup, or tatchos makes all things better.