I am a Data | Computational Social | Network Scientist. These days I just say that I'm a Scientist.

#### Why am I here?

My focus is on teaching the concepts of complexity, data science, and computational analysis to students of all backgrounds while conducting leading research. My research mission is to find interesting problems that I believe are broadly important to our understanding of human behavior and our interactions with each other and the environments that we have built for ourselves. This expresses itself in a number of different topics.

#### What don't we know yet

My primary research focus is on the diffusion of innovations in work-place networks. With collaborators at McCormick

#### So what is NP Complete Heart?

Some time during my third year of graduate school I became mentally sidetracked by the concepts of computational complexity; specifically, NP-complete algorithms and the $P=NP$ problem. This interest was borne out of my first-hand experience trying to use and optimize community identification algorithms but continued to grow. The basic gist is that a NP-complete problem is one where you cannot efficiently locate the best solution and the problem gets beyond exponentially harder as the problem size increases.

#### But you're not a mathematician!

Together this concept represents to me the incalculable complexities of humans. This incalculable complexity arises because of our emotions (heart) and through the social systems that we build to connect with each other. This concept is what weaves into my research, how can we analyze, predict, and, most importantly, understand the fundamentals of human behavior and our interactions with the world at large.
School of Engineering and Northwestern Memorial Hospital we study teams of highly- and similarly-trained individuals adopt new techniques and treatments. Through both experiments and computational modeling we seek to understand the process behind the adoption of these new techniques occurs and spreads.

My other research in healthcare is largely focused on the epidemiology of health issues that are greatly affected by social and environmental inequity. This research includes not only an interest in the extent of the health issue caused by inequities but also comparing the relative costs of prevention versus treatment. I have previously done research-related work to help enable inter-institutional data sharing and analysis while respecting patient privacy in furtherance of my overall research aim.

I am also deeply interested in either predicting or creating predictions while accounting for missing information. This interest stems from my graduate dissertation work, but my focus extends far beyond biology now. My focus now includes predicting rare events and rates of diffusion in social networks given incomplete information.