Doctoral Research
West Virginia University
2024 - 2025

"Sexual Grooming" is discussed on TikTok as a public concern and perceived risk to well-being.
Preliminary data suggest that age is an integral, two-factor dimension delineating public discourse on this topic: some users define grooming as necessarily involving minors, others extend the concept to include adults.
Adult-related discussions: more frequently contain phrases such as "young woman," "workplace groom," and "age gap"
Minor-related discussions: more frequently contain phrases such as "young girl," "high school," and "sexual assault"
Original data collected in 2025 from publicly shared TikTok videos.


The cognitive process risk perception is theoretically divided in two, distinct constructs: severity and susceptibility.
Severity: harm, weight of consequences, “seriousness.”
Susceptibility: chances, possibility, likelihood, of seeing or experiencing the phenomenon.
Students perceive opioid-related risk more severe than cybersecurity threats; however, the persons polled perceive themselves to be more susceptible to cybersecurity threats.
Original data collected in 2024 from WVU student population.


Exploratory analysis of publicly shared chats with Grok LLM from December 28, 2024 - October 11, 2025.
Left: Distribution of user messages by hour of day, identifying temporal usage patterns and peak engagement windows.
Right: Longitudinal analysis of weekly user messages compared to conversations, illustrating engagement trends, spike periods, and communication intensity over time.
Data: ShareChat

Bar graph demonstrates the relationship between healthcare provider communication and patient outcomes.
Patients who receive a greater number of advised behavioral changes from a doctor report undertaking a greater number of changes to better their health.
Data: NHANES 2025 - 2017
Interactive choropleth map visualizes all hospitals in West Virginia, categorized by facility type and linked to county and city-level information with geographic data.
Facility type: Critical Access Hospital (CAH), Long-Term Acute Care (LTAC), Prospective Payment System (PPS), Psychiatric (PSYCH), Inpatient Rehabilitation (REHAB), and Veterans Affairs (VA).
Original dataset compiled from publicly available healthcare facility information; geographic coordinates derived using Tableau mapping tools.


Opt-in data from LinkedIn demonstrates user "connection" behavior.
Left: Weekly connections made over all time on the site are visualized in aggregate by month, revealing networking activity over time, long-term trends, and identifying periods of increased connection growth.
Right: Compares weekly connections during a selected period of time (grant award period), "zooming in" on changes in engagement within an acute professional cycle, observing notable spikes in connection activity.
See full project and code on GitHub.