11:20am Room A - Computational Social Sciences

Dr. Karina Salazar
Assistant Professor Center for the Study of Higher Education University of Arizona Linkedin Website
Karina Salazar is an assistant professor in the Center for the Study of Higher Education. Her research program analyzes whether the enrollment management practices of public universities undermine access for underserved student populations, with a particular focus on recruiting and marketing. Using “data science” methodologies and FOIA requests as data collection strategies, her current work explores how university recruiting and marketing efforts spatially discriminate against high schools and communities with predominantly low-income students and Students of Color. Salazar’s research has been published in The American Educational Research Journal, The Journal of Higher Education, and Research in Higher Education. She is also co-principal investigator of the Enrollment Management, Recruiting, and Access research project, which has been featured by The New York Times, NPR, CNN, Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Forbes, and U.S. News & World Report. Salazar is a local Tucsonan and proud graduate of Sunnyside High School. She completed her graduate work at the University of Arizona where her dissertation research was funded by the American Educational Research Association.
Dr. Kendra Thompson-Dyck
Senior Research Analyst Assessment & Research University of Arizona Website
Dr. Kendra Thompson-Dyck serves as the Senior Research Analyst in Assessment & Research at the University of Arizona where her work supports institution-wide data collection and assessment to improve student experiences and outcomes. She is also a research affiliate of the Southwest Institute for Research on Women (SIROW). Kendra is an experienced applied researcher proficient in quantitative, qualitative, and spatial methods. Past collaborations include large-scale research and evaluation projects on community infrastructure and youth well-being in Arizona and cross-nationally, funded by the National Science Foundation and Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Currently, she serves as a program evaluator on a $3 million Department of Education grant for Project Outreach FAMILIA which aims to strengthen STEM education and college-going resources for low-income, Hispanic high school students. Her authored and co-authored work appears in the Crime and Delinquency, Journal of Urban Affairs, Children and Youth Services Review, and Drug Court Review and has been featured at scholarly conferences and invited talks nationally and internationally including the International Sociological Association World Congress of Sociology in Yokohama, Japan and annual meetings of the American Sociological Association and Urban Affairs Association. Kendra holds a master’s degree and doctorate in Sociology from the University of Arizona and a bachelor’s degree in Communication from Seattle Pacific University.
Dr. Beth Tellman
Assistant Professor School of Geography Development & Environment University of Arizona Website
Dr. Beth Tellman is a human-environment geographer whose research addresses the causes and consequences of global environmental change on people, focusing on access to water, flood risk, and land-use change. She engages in multiple disciplines and methods to “socialize the pixel” or understand the social processes behind environmental change captured in satellite image pixels and leverage satellite data to improve human well-being. Beth is an Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona in the School of Geography, Development, and Environment. She is co-founder and Chief Science Officer at Cloud to Street, a public benefit corporation that leverages remote sensing data to build flood monitoring and mapping systems for low- and middle-income countries and insurance companies. Beth received her Ph.D. in Geography (2019) from Arizona State University. She has held fellowships with Echoing Green, Fulbright, and the National Science Foundation.
Cas Laskowski
Associate Librarian Head of Research, Data & Instruction University of Arizona Website
Cas Laskowski is veteran, librarian, gamer, teacher, Latina, techie, comic book nerd, and empiricist in perpetual beta. Currently the Head of Research, Data, & Instruction at the University of Arizona, she leverages her various skillsets to bolster faculty scholarship, train legal changemakers, and advocate for more inclusive work and learning spaces. She regularly writes and presents about the impact of technology on libraries and legal practice and was a founding fellow of the IDEA Institute on AI. Her areas of research interest include legal data infrastructures, A2J, ethical use of AI, and co-collaborative pedagogy that empower learners.
Moderator: Laura Werthmann Dozal
PhD Student School of Information University of Arizona Website Linkedin
Laura W. Dozal is a PhD student at UofA’s iSchool. Her recent work has focused on analyzing and visualizing network clusters to understand social behavior. Her methods in the past have been deep learning for Natural Language Processing applications of online crime and disinformation, as well as quantitative network analysis to identify community spaces. Her research specifically covers topics of gender equality movements in Latin America, community perception, and more recently, criminal organizations.