Grad School
Doctoral study in Information
The academic half of the work, on a page of its own: the direction I am reading toward, the questions driving it, and the projects that sit closest to them.
Direction
The question I keep coming back to is the one the engineering work puts in front of me every week. An employer and a worker are in a data relation with each other, that relation is assembled out of perfectly ordinary infrastructure — directory services, endpoint agents, access logs, hardening baselines, ticket queues — and almost nobody on either side of it can see its shape.
I have spent about fifteen years building that infrastructure. It is an unusual vantage on the subject, and it is most of why I want to study it rather than only run it: I know what these systems actually collect, how the evidence they produce is made, and how far a documented behaviour can drift from the running one.
My BA is in Communication, from UC San Diego in 2023 — a 4.0, summa cum laude, with coursework mostly on how digital technology and surveillance shape social life. Doctoral study in Information is where the two halves meet: close enough to the technical detail to be accurate about it, far enough out to ask what the detail is doing to people.
Research interests
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Workplace surveillance
Workplace surveillance and the data relation between employers and workers
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Privacy and data governance
Privacy policy, data governance and how regulation meets technical reality
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Algorithmic bias
Algorithmic bias in automated evaluation and labor-management systems
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Measurement validity
Measurement validity — whether a metric measures what it claims to measure
Questions
- What does a workplace monitoring system actually measure, as against what its documentation says it measures?
- Where does a hardening baseline stop being security and start being surveillance? Both are assembled out of the same telemetry.
- How much of the data relation they are in can a worker see, and what would it take to make it legible to them?
- When an automated evaluation gets someone wrong, who is in a position to find out?
Selected work
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Cross-Modal Instrument
A research prototype asking whether perceptually meaningful concepts can act as a shared vocabulary for sound and moving image. It processes live audio and video in real time under a small set of common controls, routes between the two explicitly rather than magically, and records what a performer actually does with it.
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GSI Posting Watcher
A watcher for graduate-instructor postings: it polls a university career-interest page and a departmental open-postings site on a schedule, normalizes what it finds into stable keys so the same listing is recognized across runs, and emails only genuinely new ones. A small web application around that loop — a results table, notification settings, and an admin-token-protected manual refresh.
Collaboration
Open to research conversations, reading recommendations, and anyone working on the same material from the policy, labor or measurement side. Based in San Diego, California.