Alyssa Smith

Alyssa (she/her) is a second-year PhD student working with Prof. Brooke Foucault Welles and Prof. David Lazer. She is interested in Twitter networks, particularly network tie formation and the roles of algorithmic curation and user choice in content exposure. She’s also a data engineer and data scientist by training and works on building more robust data pipelines for Twitter datasets. Her current projects focus on Jorts the Cat as a disruptive Twitter actor; the hegemonic and subversive narratives around Britney Spears’ conservatorship battle; and Twitter following behavior before and after inciting events. Before joining NetSI, she received a B.S. in Humanities and Engineering with Comparative Media Studies and Computer Science from MIT in 2017; after that, she worked in tech for 4 years.