Research is one half of my working life. The other half is building what research needs: training institutes, workshop series, communities where people learn the same tools together, and the civic work that puts data to use. Most of it is unglamorous by design — curriculum, funding, logistics, and the slow craft of matching people to problems they can actually finish. What I teach inside these programs is on the Teaching page; this page is the organizing side.
Communities & Programs
- SICSS-Istanbul — Co-founder & Co-organizer · four editions (2019, 2020, 2021, 2023). After attending SICSS-Helsinki in 2018, I helped bring the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science to Istanbul — with Matti Nelimarkka and Akın Ünver, sponsored by the Russell Sage and Alfred P. Sloan Foundations — training roughly twenty early-career researchers per edition: teaching assistant at the first edition, on the organizing committee from 2020, and back as guest lecturer in 2026. I wrote about building it for SAGE Research Methods.
- BLISS — Boston LLMs Initiative for Social Sciences — Co-founder & Lead · 2025–present, with Burak Ozturan. A NULab-funded initiative bringing LLM methods to social scientists. Its first season, November 2025: a faculty panel — Computational Social Sciences in the Age of Generative AI, with David Lazer, Tina Eliassi-Rad, Nick Beauchamp, and Beatrice Magistro — and two hands-on workshops, Transformers by Hand and Hugging Face & APIs for LLM Use. → bliss.boston
- Twitter Developers Community (Istanbul–Boston) — Community Lead · 2021–2023. A practitioner community around the academic use of the Twitter API, in the years before the platform closed off research access.
Civic Data Consulting
As Data Consultant at the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI; Northeastern & Harvard), 2023–2025, I worked with community organizers, the City of Boston, and the Boston Children’s Museum — aiding their data initiatives and building their capacity to do the analysis themselves. The through-line: a lot of public data sits unused because the people who could act on it don’t have the methods, so the value never reaches the community it describes. My job was to close that gap, from scoping the question to delivering a result a partner could use without me. The datasets this work produced are on the Civic Data page.
Peer Review
I review for International Studies Perspectives and the International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2).
Writing for the public and the press is under Public Scholarship.