Sociology Welcomes New Faculty
Alina Arseniev-Koehler (Ashelman)
Specializations: Culture; cognition; language; health; stigma; computational social science; text analysis
Alina Arseniev-Koehler is a computational and cultural sociologist with substantive interests in language, health, and social categories. Alina strives to clarify core concepts and debates about cultural meaning in sociology. For example, how do individuals learn and deploy stereotypes? Empirically, Alina focuses on cases where meaning is linked to inequality and health, such as the moral meanings attached to body weight, the stigmatizing meanings of disease, and gender stereotypes. To investigate these topics, Alina uses computational methods and machine learning, especially computational text analysis.
Alina’s work also circles around a methodological question: how can scientists measure meanings encoded in text data, such as news articles and social media posts? Computational text analysis requires scientists to mathematically model the nuanced ways in which human language encodes and conveys meaning. As highlighted by Alina’s work, innovation in computational text analysis is tightly intertwined with innovation in theoretical understanding of meanings.
Jacqui Frost
Specializations: Culture, Religion/Nonreligion, Science, Morality, Mixed Methods
Jacqui Frost is a mixed-methods cultural sociologist whose research is focused on investigating the causes and consequences of religious disaffiliation in the United States and examining how the intersections of religion, gender, and race shape people’s conceptions of science, morality, and community. She is currently working on a qualitative book project that examines how atheists sacralize science in secular congregations, as well as a longitudinal survey project that aims to create better survey measures of nonreligious beliefs and practices. Her research has been published in American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Poetics, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, and Social Currents. You can learn more about Dr. Frost's research and teaching interests at jacquifrost.com.
Lindsay Hamm
Specializations: Teaching and learning
Dr. Hamm is particularly interested in issues of equity, student autonomy and relatedness, and ways to facilitate engaged learning.
David Peterson
Specializations: Science and Technology, Culture and Cognition, Data and Society, Metascience Expertise
David Peterson studies the nexus of scientific practice, emerging technologies, and expert authority. Currently, his work focuses on two topics. First, he studies how the organizations of science are evolving to meet a variety of threats including political pressure, intensifying global competition, new communications and machine learning technologies, and emerging regulatory and managerial bodies. Second, he investigates the production of science in areas that have had chronic legitimacy problems like the social sciences to shed light on the complex interactions between politics, expertise, and authority.
Robbee Wedow
Specializations: Population health inequalities, gene-environment interactions, scientific knowledge, social demography, statistical genetics
Dr. Wedow's main research interest is in sociogenomics, which lies at the intersection of sociology, demography, and statistical & computational genetics. He is interested in how social forces and environments interact with genetics (gene-by-environment interactions). Using recent advances in genetic data collection and methodological developments in statistical genetics, he leverages large-scale genetic data to explore how sociological outcomes change across context, across time, and across outcome measurement. He is also deeply dedicated to clearly and sensitively communicating the findings from his work in an ethically-engaged and community-based fashion. He has written and taught widely on the ethical considerations and societal impacts of modern-day genomics research. He is actively involved in helping lead NSF funded work to restructure genetics curriculum in high school in order to be less deterministic, and instead to accurately reflect complex human variation. Dr. Wedow completed his PhD in Sociology and Statistical/Behavioral Genetics at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2018. He completed his postdoc in the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University, in the Analytic and Translational Genetics Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, and in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2022. His work outside of social science genetics focuses on population health, health disparities, and quasi-experimental designs and methodologies. robbeewedow.com.