I'm a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Information at UC Berkeley, where I study relationship formation via online dating from a social psychological perspective. My methodologies include laboratory experiments and survey research, and my analytic approaches include statistical analysis, data mining, and exploratory information visualization. I also hold an M.A. in Statistics from UC Berkeley.

My advisor is Coye Cheshire. He and I co-developed and have co-taught the graduate-level Computer-Mediated Communication course at the iSchool for three years. Currently we are teaching Quantitative Research Methods. I have also served as teaching assistant for the User Interface Design and Development course at Berkeley and a C++ programming course at Cornell.

Previously, I received an S.M. from the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab with Prof. Judith Donath. My master's thesis describes a quantitative analysis of the communication patterns of nearly 60,000 users on an online dating Web site.

I did my undergraduate work (an interdisciplinary mix of computer science, sociology, human-computer interaction, and psychology) at Cornell University. I've also interned at Microsoft Research and, on an entirely different career track, at The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C.

For more information, please peruse this web site, take a look at my Curriculum Vitae [PDF], or visit my blog.

Email is the best way to reach me. My address is: atf@ischool.berkeley.edu.

If you would like to send me postal mail, please direct it to 102 South Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.