I am an artist from Boston, Massachusetts. I grew up drawing in spiral bound notebooks, attempting to create my own versions of the worlds and characters I observed in my older brothers' Playstation games, like Spyro, Rayman and Gex. As young as six years old, I spent hours each day crawled beneath the old Victrola in my family's living room, filling notebook after notebook with creative sketches. With a pencil I was able to recreate the world I saw around me.
Although I don't exactly fit under the Victrola anymore, the same creative energy I had as a child now manifests itself in other ways, from paintings to essays to doodles in the margins of lecture notes. A creator above all else, I continue to value imagination and personal drive in myself and others.
Outside of art, I like reading, writing, listening to podcasts, playing video games and watching football.
Presenting research at the Data Analytics and Computational Social Science Research Symposium at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in August 2021.
Academic Work
I studied political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I was an honors student, research assistant and teaching assistant. Below are some of my favorite papers that I wrote as an undergraduate.
Honest Elections to a Degree: Donor Networks in Seattle’s Democracy Voucher Program
In November 2015, the voters of Seattle, Washington passed ballot Initiative 122. This “act relating to reducing the influence of money, ensuring accountability, and preventing corruption in City of Seattle government” established what is now known as the Democracy Voucher Program. Under this program, every voter in Seattle is mailed four $25 vouchers, totaling to $100, to donate to qualified political candidates at their own discretion, in order to rival and outweigh the influence of private spending. Enacted with the purpose of preventing corruption, ensuring fair elections, and protecting the voice of the people in the democratic process, the Democracy Voucher system was implemented in the 2017 Seattle municipal elections as the first of its kind in the nation.
In this 63-page paper — my undergraduate honors thesis — I use social network analysis and other measurements using R, an open source statistics software, to investigate how campaign donation patterns changed after this policy was implemented. The original data was found in publicly accessible records made available by the City of Seattle, monotonously cleaned and organized, and made into two different estimates to account for uncertainty found in the data. With a mass of quantitative evidence, I lay the argument that although the Democracy Voucher Program enabled more voters in Seattle to participate in campaign finance and raised a large amount of funding from small donations, it failed to fundamentally change the networks of large donors which enable candidates to win or curb the influence of outside spending – which skyrocketed as it worked around the voucher program.
Pageant Democracy: Selfish Incentives for Performing Politics
For individuals to regularly participate in a democracy when single votes will likely never make a decisive difference in any election, academics calculate that selfish incentives for voting must lurk in our subconscious. From the smoke-filled rooms of nineteenth-century party machines to the precisely measured field experiments of modern political science, a variety of evidence points towards political participation being primarily a way to show off, signal loyalty with others and build group identities without regard to electoral outcomes. Social pressure to participate in politics creates a selfish incentive to vote that has remained prevalent throughout American history and will have serious implications in a technologically-advanced future.
Major League Politics: Bayesian Predictions of Sports Culture and Trump Support
This paper uses Bayesian modeling techniques to investigate with how much certainty can the sports interests of an American metro area predict levels of 2016 Trump support? While the popularity of a sport in a metro area might seem to only be spuriously correlated with other factors, such as race or income level, interests in different sports could collectively paint a more accurate picture of a city’s political culture than other more obvious variables.
There were a few noteworthy conclusions to this preliminary analysis. First is that NASCAR interest is the single most predictive sports interest of Trump support. Second is that a model incorporating NASCAR, college football, NBA and NHL achieves the least deviance for predicting Trump support; in which NASCAR and college football interest are positive predictors of Trump support and NBA and NHL interest are negative predictors of Trump support. Thirdly, even when incorporating race and southern-ness, NASCAR still predicts Trump support better as an exclusive predictor. These noteworthy conclusions are reason for further future analysis with more a larger, more representative sample.
Understanding 2012 Obama Voters’ 2016 Turnout
The unexpected yet stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election demands an inquiry into where the Democratic base established by Barack Obama went and how it acted in 2016. This memo addresses the following: What were the demographics, specifically race and age, of 2012 Obama voters lost by Democrats who chose not to vote in 2016? The memo uses data from the 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a nationally representative sample of 64,600 American adults. The CCES is administered every year, with a larger set of questions asked over multiple phases on election years. The data was analyzed using R, an open source statistical program.
The Isolation of the American Heart
When Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in the 1830s, he observed a curious uniformity of feelings, opinions and interests among citizens which he saw to be the result of an “unconscious agreement” rather than a “rational decision to remain united” (438). Such unconscious unity seems lost today in an America raging with inequality, partisanship, and cultural battles over countless political controversies. Tocqueville’s analysis is not to be forgotten. His warnings against the very individualism made possible by equality, potentially causing private interests to eclipse that of the public, explain certain origins of the modern culture wars which have eroded Americans’ unconscious agreement with one another. However, the potential cures he devised in the 1830’s have lost their relevance in the twenty-first century. In light of a modern America which Tocqueville could never have imagined, a new political science is once again in demand to reconcile the interests of an individualized democracy.
Private meeting with Robert A. DeLeo, Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives; July 2018