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The State Vaccine Policy Project (Co-Director)
​Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, lawmakers across the US to have introduced legislation aimed at weakening existing vaccine-related policies (e.g., vaccine mandates in employment or educational settings). However, reports of anti-vaccine policymaking (AVP) across state legislatures have been largely anecdotal. The State Vaccine Policy Project (SVPP) is a first-of-its-kind effort to quantify and standardize reporting of the prevalence, characteristics, and correlates of AVP. When completed, SVPP data will contain a content-coded record of every piece of vaccine-related legislation introduced across US statehouses from 2009 – present. You can read more about SVPP here.
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​​​​​​​Assessing the Effectiveness of Common Health Messaging Tactics on Vaccine Uptake
​Our NSF-funded research leverages insights from the science of science communication to build a multi-stage, multi-method, and multidisciplinary research agenda aimed at rigorously identifying (1) how health agencies have made an effort to encourage vaccine uptake for three vaccines (COVID-19, seasonal influenza, and tetanus) in the past, and (2) the degree to which those efforts are successful. The research accomplishes the first objective by employing “big data” content analytic procedures developed by the research team to identify themes and message design elements present in past efforts to encourage vaccine uptake from federal and local health agencies. The project then assesses the effectiveness of past vaccine promotion efforts via a series of randomized controlled trials embedded in public opinion surveys; including (a) a “pilot phase” conjoint experimental study embedded in a longitudinal survey capable of assessing the effectiveness of several hundred different messaging strategies, (b) a “confirmatory phase” factorial experiment – embedded in a nationally representative cross-sectional study – testing the effectiveness of the most promising interventions identified in the pilot phase, and (c) an “implementation phase” field experiment – conducted in partnership with market research agencies – that administers our most effective treatments identified in our “confirmatory phase” on search engine platforms. In the study’s field experimental phase, the researchers will evaluate the effect of vaccine promotion messages on both verified vaccine uptake data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as well as individual vaccine uptake self-reports from state-level opinion surveys deployed across a randomly-selected set of treatment zip codes, within treated counties, and among a representative sample of five U.S. states. While the funding period for this study has concluded, we are in the process of writing a Cambridge Element summarizing results from all stages of this project. You can read more about our work here.
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Creator-Engaged Research to Promote Evidence-Based Health Attitudes & Behaviors
​I am part of a team at the Center for Health Communication at the TH Chan School of Public Health at Harvard that works with content creators to study health communication at scale on social media; including vertical video platforms like TikTok. We use a wide range of methodological tools – including automated text analysis, large language modeling, population based survey experiments, and large scale field experiments embedded on social media – to study creator-led health promotion on social media. I am currently part of a project conducting field experimental work both on TikTok and offline that is supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. You can read more about the Center's work here.
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Studying the Social, Economic, and Public Health Impacts of Problem Gambling​
​I am part of a multi-investigator research team funded by the Massachusetts Gaming Commission (MGC) studying the social, economic, and public health impact of gambling in Massachusetts. Our team is also investigating the prevalence and public health consequences of gambling -- including sports betting, internet gaming, and prediction market activity -- across the United States. I am especially interested in studying the impact of casino, prediction market, and sports betting advertising on gambling-related attitudes and behaviors. You can read more about our work here.