Senior Advisor
Jul 2026 – Present
J-PAL (Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab), MIT
- Advise J-PAL's AI portfolio across research, policy, and practice, working on the Project on AI and Evidence (PAIE).
- PAIE identifies, evaluates, and scales innovative applications of AI for social good and in the fight against poverty, bringing together AI adopters, tech companies, and researchers.
- Support rigorous evaluation of AI-based programs — largely randomized evaluations — across education, health, labor markets, climate change, and financial inclusion.
- Build practical guidance and capacity for researchers, governments, and NGOs evaluating AI interventions.
Founder, Social Capital Lab
Mar 2026 – Present
Social Capital Lab (independent)
- Continue to lead the Social Capital Lab as an independent effort following its time at Meta, studying how social connection shapes economic opportunity and well-being.
- Maintain and extend the public social capital and social connectedness datasets used by researchers and policymakers worldwide.
Founder, Social Capital Lab
Apr 2020 – Mar 2026
Meta
- Founded and led a social science research group partnering with academics, nonprofits, and NGOs to study how social networks impact economic opportunity and well-being.
- Built and released the Social Connectedness Index (with NYU), now a widely-used public dataset for researchers studying migration, trade, COVID-19, and inequality.
- Co-created the Social Capital Atlas with Opportunity Insights (socialcapital.org), mapping social capital across U.S. communities; covered by the New York Times and The Economist.
- Led cross-institutional collaborations producing the UK Social Capital Atlas, Cross-Gender Ties dataset, Migration Atlas, and Networks & Long Ties dataset.
- Research published in Nature (2), PNAS, the Journal of Political Economy, and other leading journals.
- Widespread press coverage of our work on social networks in the New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and several international outlets.
Founder and Manager, Political Science Research Team
Jan 2018 – Apr 2020
Meta
- Founded a team of research scientists and computational social scientists studying the impact of social media on elections, migration, well-being, and economic mobility.
- Established partnerships with external academic institutions and NGOs to create public policy solutions to reduce misinformation on social media.
Founder and Manager, News Feed Science Team
Jun 2016 – Jan 2018
Meta
- Co-created and led a team of research scientists and engineers studying long-term dynamics within the News Feed ecosystem and implications for recommender systems.
- Built some of the first fake-news detection algorithms, launched in production in 2016.
- Our team created leading AI solutions for improving News Feed recommendations and won a best-paper award at EC for our recommender systems paper.
Founder and Manager, Economics Research Team
Jan 2014 – Jun 2016
Meta
- Founded Facebook's first economics team: a multidisciplinary group of PhDs, researchers, and engineers focused on advertising marketplace modeling, auction theory, pricing, and revenue forecasting.
- Built tools and methodology for financial and behavioral modeling adopted across the company.
- Our research was published in several leading outlets on economics and computation, including EC, WWW, WSDM, ICWSM, and IC2S2.
Research Scientist / Economist
Feb 2012 – Jan 2014
Facebook
- Studied computational economics problems through experimentation, simulation, and econometric models focused on advertising markets, ad auctions, and financial forecasting.
- Designed and created Facebook's first model-based revenue forecast incorporating novel demand and supply elasticity measurements, improving forecast accuracy by over 20%.
Research Intern
Oct 2011 – Jan 2012
Facebook
- Investigated competitive externalities of advertising; built an auction simulation algorithm to evaluate site-wide impact on key metrics.
Research Intern
Apr 2011 – Oct 2011
Yahoo!
- Developed a theoretical and statistical model for targeted advertising effectiveness; paper accepted at WWW 2012.
Lecturer & Research Assistant
Sep 2007 – Feb 2012
Stanford University
- Taught intermediate economics (2010–2011) with a performance rating of 4.4/5. Mentored undergraduate honors theses.