I study how people and places continually shape one another — and how to measure that relationship computationally.
My work spans scales: from the developmental onset of place-based identity to large-scale cultural patterns shaped by terrain, ecology, and mobility. During my doctoral research at The New School for Social Research, I introduced placefulness — the degree to which a person's sense of self is tied to specific environments — along with a harmonic-mean measure of residential stability that outperforms conventional mobility metrics in predicting identity, prosocial behavior, and memory structure. The framework was validated across cross-cultural samples of 1,400+ participants in Japan and the United States.
As a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia Business School (Michael Morris Lab), I extend this lens to organizations — treating them as participants in psychological measurement rather than objects of survey. Scoring the public filings of 7,300+ U.S. public companies across 57 behavioral dimensions, the method predicts DOJ criminal prosecutions at a nested cross-validated AUC of 0.944 and generates walk-forward validated alpha in equity markets.
Through Stronglight, I translate this work into infrastructure for institutional capital. Public filings are mandatory cultural performances; read carefully, they reveal the ethos of the firms that produce them. Our platform, Prism, turns that signal into a dataset — organizational character, measured at scale.
Environments don't merely surround us. They participate in making us who we are — and through ongoing cross-cultural collaborations, I'm working to show how ecological frictions and affordances unlock creativity, adaptation, and resilience at every scale, from the person to the firm.
If any of this overlaps with what you're working on, I'd like to hear from you.