Most of my work happens alongside students and staff. I lead the Network Science and Social Network Analysis at the U (NetSNAU) research group, and I mentor and advise students at the high-school, undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral levels.
Current
Sima Najafzadehkhoei (2024–present)Ph.D. student in Biostatistics, Population Health Sciences, University of Utah. Mentor and research assistant supervisor. Computational epidemiology, agent-based models, and machine learning.
Anibal Olivera (2024–present)Ph.D. student in Social Complexity, Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile. Mentor and research assistant supervisor. Network science and R package development.
Olivia Banks (2024–present)Undergraduate honors student, double major in Computer Science and Cellular and Molecular Biology, University of Utah. Mentor and research assistant supervisor. Software development and computational epidemiology.
Past
Derek Meyer (2022–2024)M.Sc. student in Population Health Sciences, University of Utah. Supervisor, research assistant supervisor, and thesis committee member. Agent-based models for epidemics. Now Biostatistician at the University of Utah Data Coordinating Center.
Jake Wagoner (2025)Staff, Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute, University of Utah. Co-supervisor and mentor. Tool development for ForeSITE. Now a graduate student in computer science and Software Engineer at PassiveLogic.
Andrew Pulsipher (2025)Data scientist on the ForeSITE team, the CDC Insight Net center led by the University of Utah. Research assistant supervisor. R packages and tooling for outbreak analytics. Now Software Engineer at PointClickCare.
Eric Anto (2023–2026)Ph.D. student in Biostatistics, Population Health Sciences, University of Utah. Dissertation committee member.
Hyrum Thomas Diesen (2024–2025)Ph.D. student in Molecular, Cellular, and Evolutionary Biology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Utah. Mentor.
Jacqueline M. Kent-Marvick (2022–2024)Ph.D. in Health Sciences, College of Nursing, University of Utah. Mentor. Network science and social network analysis. Now Research Assistant Professor at the University of Utah College of Nursing.
Katherine (Kayleigh) Lawson-Michod (2022–2024)Ph.D. student in Clinical and Translational Epidemiology, Population Health Sciences, University of Utah. Qualifying exam chair and dissertation committee member. Now a postdoctoral fellow at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.
Porter Bischoff (2023)Undergraduate student, Utah Valley University, Summer Program for Undergraduate Research (SPUR) at the University of Utah. Mentor. Network visualization with R. Now a medical student at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
- Luis Lopez (2022)
Postbaccalaureate fellow, National Institutes of Health. Mentor. Exponential-family random graph models.
My own mentors
I completed my Ph.D. in Biostatistics at the University of Southern California under the supervision of Prof. Paul Marjoram and Prof. Kayla de la Haye. How I advise students today owes a great deal to how they advised me. That work became my dissertation, Essays on Bioinformatics and Social Network Analysis: Statistical and Computational Methods for Complex Systems.
Working with me
If you are interested in network science, statistical computing, or computational epidemiology, feel free to set up a meeting.