Alyssa Smith

Alyssa (she/her) is a fourth-year PhD candidate working with Brooke Foucault Welles and David Lazer. Her current work focuses on the ways that structure and agency interact in social networks to encourage mobilization. She is also interested in making big data and computational tools usable by academics without specialized technical training. She uses mixed methods, ranging from terabyte-scale datasets to autoethnography, to make sense of the world. Before joining NetSI, she received a B.S. in Humanities and Engineering with Comparative Media Studies and Computer Science from MIT in 2017; after that, she worked in tech for 4 years.