Ryan Gallagher

Ryan is a third-year Ph.D. student working with Professor Brooke Foucault Welles as a part of the Communication Media and Marginalization (CoMM) Lab. At the Network Science Institute, he designs and applies blockmodeling and natural language processing algorithms to study how marginalized individuals leverage online social networks and hashtag activism to amplify their voices. He is particularly interested in how such amplification can cause polarized public spheres to collide, and how those collisions can be safeguarded from discursive and structural manipulation. Ryan holds an M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Vermont, where he worked with the Computational Story Lab at the Vermont Complex Systems Center, and a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Connecticut.