In this technical report, I explored potential data entry errors as part of my job at the California DOJ Research Center. I work with a team of four others to analyze a large dataset (3 million+ rows) for an annual report on racial profiling by police officers, under the direction of a board of subject-matter experts. The board wanted to analyze whether there were racial disparities in how police stops lasted. However, an initial analysis showed that a small subset of stops had an unusually long stop duration, which suggested that the data may have been incorrectly entered for some stops. My assignment was to investigate these cases. I identified four types of errors that could potentially explain these patterns in the data and proposed several solutions to reduce these errors in future waves of data collection. 

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This is an interactive data dashboard that I built using R Shiny for a research project that I recently submitted for publication. The study assessed whether a 11 different social factors were associated with vasopressin, a hormone associated with bonding and other types of social behaviors, across 14 different brain regions. I created this app to allow readers to explore the data themselves and visualize specific analyses of interest. The app also allows users to visualize the data's variability across subjects and brain regions.

Web App

This is a report that I wrote to demonstrate my ability to perform descriptive analyses and create summary data visualizations using R Markdown. The report explores factors associated with educational achievement in a public data set from the National Center for Education Statistics.  

PDF · R Code (R Markdown File)

In this first-authored study, I used three data sets (550+ participants) to assess whether first impressions during speed-dating predicted later romantic pursuit. I meta-analyzed the results across studies, and found that impressions based on compatibility and popularity were the strongest predictors of later dating. This project demonstrates my ability to communicate results to both technical audiences (in a journal article) and lay audiences (in press interviews).

PDF · PNAS Article · Data, R Code, & Preregistration . Newsweek Coverage · Altmetric: Top 5% Attention Score

In this first-authored study, I explored whether infant personality measures were associated with biological markers of health and immunity (methylation in immune cells) across over 1 million sites in the genome. This project demonstrates my ability to identify key trends from large quantities of data and my ability to work with large data sets in R.

PDF . Journal Article . 

This is a statistics lab that I wrote to teach students how to perform machine learning analyses via regularization (ridge and lasso regression). The lab uses a data set from scientific study on the social lives of people that identify as asexual, and demonstrates how machine learning can be used to identify the best predictors of an outcome (sexual identity) across many psychological and social predictors (10+). The lab also teaches students about the danger of overfitting a regression model with too many predictors, and demonstrates that regression analyses can be evaluated by testing the model in a hold out data set that was not used for training the original model. 

PDF · R Code (Markdown File) · Associated Data 

This is a statistics lab that I wrote to teach students how to use bootstrapping and data simulation to plan studies (power analyses) and estimate population parameters (prevalance rates), even when limited information is available and must be compiled from different sources. The lab also teaches students how to apply these principles to estimate confidence intervals for data analysis.

PDF · R Code (Markdown File)

This is a group project that I did as part of a research methods and measurements course. The assignment was to create a 10-question survey to measure a psychological construct. We then had to administer the survey and analyze the resulting data to assess whether our measures had psychometric reliability and subscale reliability (determined via correlational analysis and factor analysis).

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In this 7 minute oral presentation, I present an overview and preliminary results on a psychology research project. The study investigated how initial compatibility between potential partners contributes to relationship formation, and found converging lines of evidence in both humans and monkeys. 

This presentation was given at The Love Consortium 2021 Virtual Research Conference.

Youtube Video

This is a poster that I designed and presented at an academic research conference (on the same project described above). This poster demonstrates my ability to create aesthetic and engaging presentations that effectively communicate research results. 

This poster was presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology 2022 Research Confence.

PDF of Poster