I am a lecturer in the School of Information at UC Berkeley. I also work as a data scientist at Facebook. Previously, I was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at Michigan State University.

I completed my Ph.D. in August 2010 at the School of Information, where I studied relationship formation via online dating from a social psychological perspective. My colleagues and I used approaches including laboratory experiments and survey research, and analytic approaches including statistical analysis, data mining, and exploratory information visualization.

My Ph.D. advisor was Coye Cheshire. He and I co-developed and co-teach the graduate-level Computer-Mediated Communication course at the iSchool. We also taught Quantitative Research Methods in Spring 2009. In the past, I have served as teaching assistant for courses on User Interface Design and Development and C++ programming.

Along the way, I received an M.A. in Statistics (2009) from UC Berkeley and an M.S. from the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab (2004) 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 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, or visit my blog (currently on hiatus).

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