I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Computational Social Science Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Knight Fellow at the Center for Media, Technology, and Democracy.

As a computational social scientist, I study how people interact with information and how these interactions shape public opinion and behavior. My research combines causal inference, machine learning, and experimental methods to investigate the structure and effects of modern information systems. Most recently, I have been using large language models to detect and quantify media bias at scale and design experiments to evaluate the effects of bias in mainstream news. This work was featured in the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI).

I completed my Ph.D. in the Social and Engineering Systems program at the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, and in Statistics through the Interdisciplinary Program in Statistics, with an affiliation at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. My doctoral research combined methods from causal inference and behavioral science to study habit formation in consumer behavior, and included survey experiments on public attitudes toward climate change and the credibility of native advertising in online media.

I received my Bachelor’s degree with a double major in Electrical Engineering and Physics from the Sharif University of Technology.