Third-year PhD student Nari Yoo has joined NYU Silver’s Constance and Martin Silver Center on Data Science and Social Equity (C+M Silver Center) as a Pre-Doctoral Fellow. In this role, she will support efforts to promote data science and social equity scholarship in coordination with Interim Center Director Dr. Marya Gwadz and Director of Operations Amanda Ritchie.
Among other projects, Nari will assist with organizing the 2023 Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS) at NYU Silver, which is being sponsored and hosted by the C+M Silver Center in partnership with NYU Silver and will have a focus on data science for social equity. SICSS is a two-week program held each summer at multiple sites around the world to provide free training to the next generation of researchers at the intersection of social science and data science—and to incubate cutting-edge research across disciplinary boundaries. Nari was a participant in the 2021 SICSS at Rutgers University.
Nari’s interests include mental health in immigrant and refugee communities, minority mental health, mental health services, and advocacy. Her methodological interests focus on leveraging computational social science approaches to social work research to improve mental health and services among minority populations, focusing on natural language processing and geospatial analysis.
For the past two years, Nari has worked as a data analyst for two C+M Silver Center-funded projects with Associate Professor Doris F. Chang and Professor Victoria Stanhope. In conjunction with Dr. Chang’s CARA/ABRA projects, she is analyzing Twitter data based on machine learning algorithms to assess racism and anti-immigrant sentiment at the state/county level and examine its impact on mental health outcomes. As a primary data analyst on Dr. Stanhope’s project, Nari is utilizing natural language processing techniques to analyze clinical notes in behavioral health settings in order to measure person-centered care in behavioral health settings.
Beyond conducting her own research and scholarship, Nari maintains a research blog providing step-by-step guides for those unfamiliar with research and methods and sharing tips and strategies for survival in graduate school. “The purpose of its content,” Nari said, “is to provide information to students who have fewer connections with academia or are nervous about asking questions to teachers or tutors due to the barriers.” Access her blog posts and learn more about Nari at https://nariyoo.com.
