I am an Assistant Professor at the UMass Amherst School of Public Policy. My research combines mixed methods and computational approaches to examine how nonprofits and communities advance social justice and policy change, both online and offline, through philanthropy, leadership, and advocacy. My research is informed by primary and secondary data sources, encompassing administrative data, survey data, interviews, and textual data obtained from sources like annual reports and Twitter.
Specifically, I utilize large administrative datasets derived from IRS tax form 990 to analyze fundraising and grantmaking behaviors within the nonprofit sector. Additionally, my work adopts computational methods such as supervised machine learning techniques to classify community foundations' fundraising messages, structural topic modeling to assess how strong donor influence might affect the thematic patterns of public engagement messages, and trace message diffusion networks of climate action and contrarian nonprofits on Twitter.
