I enjoy mentoring students at different stages of their academic journey — from first research experiences through graduate-level work. My approach combines structured guidance with real intellectual freedom. I push students to do rigorous work and to think carefully about what it means to do that work well.
Students in my group work on problems in agent-based modeling, complex networks, social computing, machine learning, and computational modeling of human behavior. I particularly enjoy projects where the computational methods connect to real questions about society — health, crime, politics, community.
At Calvin, I also think about how our values and faith inform how we approach research. That doesn’t mean every project needs an explicit theological angle, but it does mean I take seriously questions about who benefits from this work and what we’re responsible for.
If you’re interested in working together, the best first step is to read through the current and past student projects to get a sense of the kind of work we do, then email me.