About: Maryam Gooyabadi customizes, developes, and utilizes appropriate computational and mathematical methodologies to study social conventions (e.g shared linguistic meaning, belief systems, norms, culture, or ideologies). Examples include agent-based dynamic and evolutionary models, Bayesian non-parametric clustering, along with other machine learning techniques (e.g. reinforcement learning). Social conventions such as shared beliefs or ideologies influence group attitudes and behavior. Understanding how ideologies form, evolve, and influence groups can provide powerful insights into how such beliefs could be shaped through targeted social interventions. This can be particularly useful in identifying how extremist beliefs form and spread, changing attitudes towards marginalized groups, and increasing between-group cooperation, to name a few. Whereas the study of ideology and beliefs gets artificially divided into topics and studied by various departments separately, each with different departmental aims (e.g. political science, religious studies, sociology), her research studies them holistically. Her research has employed methodologies and collaborated with researchers from computer science, philosophy of science, social sciences (e.g. anthropology, economics), and mathematics. In her dissertation "Discovering latent social concepts across societies", she studied linguistic meaning and ideologies using machine learning to uncover universal features across groups. 

Her Current research includes the study of innovations in firearms and its broader social influence.

Biography: 

I'm an Assistant professor of practice at Wesleyan Univeristy. I have a broad educational background with a Bachelor's of Science degree in Computer Science Engineering (CU Boulder) and a Bachelor's of Arts degree in Psychology (CUNY), a Master's of Arts degree in Philosophy, Political science, and Economics (PPE) from the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science (UC Irvine), and a Doctoral degree in Mathematical Behavioral Sciences from the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences (IMBS) in the School of Social Sciences (UC Irvine).  I have experience outside of academia as a program director in China for undergraduate research, founder and co-founder in three tech startups, work in international development in India, and as a lab manager in New York before continuing my graduate education in California. Some of her hobbies include construction, archery, hiking, traveling, cooking, arts and crafts, carving, and lion dancing.