I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. My research and teaching interests are in energy and the environment, political sociology, social networks, and computational social science.

My research examines social issues that emerge at the interface of politics, industry, and the environment. I am interested in how emerging energy industries become politically contested and how this contestation influences regulation and policymaking, the emergence of new industries, and the distribution of environmental risks and benefits. I have explored these issues in the context of the boom in oil and gas production enabled by "fracking" technology and in the context of residential solar PV technology.

​A secondary research agenda addresses a broader set of questions related to social networks, organizations, and politics.

Methodologically, I specialize in applying quantitative and computational techniques to collect and analyze behavioral data from diverse sources including public records and large-scale administrative datasets, online “digital trace” data, and text data.

My research has appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Energy, Nature Sustainability, Nature Human Behaviour, American Sociological Review, and Social Forces, among other outlets and has been supported by grants from the primary science funding agencies in the U.S. and Canada (NSF and SSHRC).

Photo credit: Liz Beddall Photography