
OUR
Candidates
Our interdisciplinary team combines expertise in educational theory, mathematics education, and computer science computational research in social media data analytics.
Zixi Chen
CONGRATULATIONS TO ZIXI! SHE ACCEPTED A POSITION AS A POST-DOCTORAL RESEARCHER AT THE LEARNING INFORMATICS LABORATORY AT UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA-TWIN CITIES.
I am currently a Ph.D. candidate at the College of Education, Michigan State University, majoring in Measurement and Quantitative Methods. I have a strong focus on using quantitative methods to answer empirical social science questions, particularly in teacher development and student learning.
Expecting to complete my doctoral degree in May 2020, I am seeking a career at a research institution or ed-tech/social media company with a focus on studying individual's technology-based information-seeking and learning behaviors.
My research interests lie at the intersection between quantitative and computational methods. During my doctoral studies, I worked in the Teachers in Social Media project with a multi-disciplinary team. This work primarily focused on the study of teachers’ curation behaviors related to digital instructional resources on social media.
The statistical and computational methods that I mainly specialize in include HLM, social network analysis, interrupted time series analysis, factor analysis, and text mining. I have strong skills in R and Stata, and am familiar with Python. Substantively, I have background in educational theory and policy and hold teacher certification.
Five keywords for describing myself:
Committed, Analytical, Dynamic, Detail-oriented, and Broad-minded.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/zixi-chen-9164838b/
Hamid Karimi
I am currently a Ph.D. student of Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at Michigan State University (MSU) and a member of the Data Science and Engineering (DSE) lab. My research interests are in machine learning, data mining, natural language processing, social network analysis, and computational social science.
Expecting to complete my doctoral degree in August 2020, I am seeking a career at a research institution with a focus on quantitative and qualitative studies of social science problems using machine learning algorithms and techniques. I have published several papers in the top conferences and journals on networking, social network analysis, big data, machine learning, and education. Moreover, I am an active member of the Teachers in Social Media Project at MSU where I develop data mining and machine learning models and algorithms to characterize instructional resources on online social media.
I received several awards including the best paper award for our paper presented at 2018 IEEE-ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, which is one of the top conferences in social network analysis. Please refer to my webpage for more detail http://cse.msu.edu/~karimiha/
Five keywords for describing myself: Focused, Innovative, Collaborative, Open-minded, and Committed.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamid-karimi-27436076/
We use qualitative and quantitative approaches to examine teachers' engagement in social media and virtual spaces. Job candidates have been trained in marrying computer science and big data with theoretical and practical applications within social science.
Tyler Derr
CONGRATULATIONS! WE WOULD LIKE TO WISH TYLER WELL AS HE TRANSITIONS TO A TENURE TRACK ASSISTANT PROFESSOR POSITION IN COMPUTER SCIENCE AT VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY THIS FALL!
I am currently a Computer Science Ph.D. student in the Data Science and Engineering (DSE) Lab at Michigan State University (MSU).
My research spans across the following three main areas: (1) signed social network analysis,
i.e., network analysis with negative links, where positive links represent friends/trust and negative links represent foes/distrust; (2) deep learning on graphs, which attempts to harness deep learning for graph structured data; and (3) data science for social good, where my work has spanned across a wide variety of domains, such as Education through my involvement in the TISM project.
Expecting to complete my doctoral degree in Summer 2020, I am seeking a tenure-track Assistant Professor position at a research institution starting in Fall 2020. More specifically, in Computer Science or Computational Social Science, where I plan to use my unique skill set and experiences in data science and interdisciplinary research to have a direct impact towards improving our society.
My research has received numerous prestigious awards, such as Best Student Poster Award at SDM19; “People’s Choice” Award for the 3 Minute Thesis Competition at MSU; 2nd Prize at University of Michigan’s Postdoctoral Symposium; and my advisor receiving his NSF CAREER Award based on my research in social network analysis with negative links.
I’m always open for discussions and collaborations, so please feel free to contact me.
http://www.TylerDerr.com
derrtyle@msu.edu

Collaborators
Alan Daly, Ph.D.-University of Southern California San Diego
Christine Greenhow, Ph.D.- Michigan State University
Martin Rehm, Ph.D.- PH Weingarten
Frank Cornelissen, Ph.D.-University of Cambridge
Mark Berends, Ph.D.- Notre Dame University
Bill Carbarnaro, Ph.D.- Notre Dame University
Diana Brandon, Ph.D.- Charleston Southern University
Ann Marie Mapes- Michigan Department of Education
Teachers in Social Media Alumni
Amanda Opperman- Michigan State University
Yun-jia Lo, Ph.D.- University of Michigan
Nicole Donzella- University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Brianna Canedo- Michigan State University
Andy Jurasek- Michigan State University
Emily Emrick- Teach for America 2019 corps member- Indianapolis
Kimberly Jansen, Ph.D.- Middle Tennessee State University
John Lane, Ph.D.- Michigan State University
Study of Elementary Mathematics Instruction
Peter Youngs, Ph.D.- University of Virginia
Kristen Bieda, Ph.D.- Michigan State University
Serena Salloum, Ph.D.- Ball State University
Epistemic Network Analysis Team
David Williamson Shaffer, Ph.D.- University of Wisconsin
Drew Huang- University of Wisconsin
Sara Tabatabai-University of Wisconsin
Brendan Eagan- University of Wisconsin