Howdy! Welcome to my website.  I’m Jean, a data scientist in Princeton, NJ and doctoral candidate at Princeton University in the Department of Sociology.  Professionally, my expertise is in statistical analysis and natural language processing and in foreign exchange. Academically, my areas of research are Political Economy, Economic Sociology, and Race/Ethnicity.

I graduated with Honors from the University of Texas at Austin (Hook ’em, Horns!) with degrees in Sociology (Honors), Economics, and Mathematics.  While at UT, I conducted research on the impact emigration had on population structure in Mexico under the supervision of Dr. Arthur Sakamoto and Dr. Nestor Rodriguez.  I was also a McNair Scholar, a peer mentor, a peer adviser in the sociology department, and a generally fun person to be around.

For my dissertation I am studying changing narratives in US economic policy from 1945  to the present and focusing on the changing meaning/understanding of “inflation” and “unemployment”.  I am using a various NLP techniques to analyze different government corpora, such as the transcripts from the Federal Open Market Committee and the Official Statement and Speeches of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

Currently, I am lead author on a project analyzing discourse in the Brexit campaigns: Vote Leave and Britain Stronger in Europe. The paper is part of a larger workshop on the tension between technocracy and democracy hosted by the University of Zurich. The papers in the workshop will be published in an edited volume within the next year.

Finally, I have also conducted research on developmental institutions as an RA for Dr. Alejandro Portes using Qualitative Comparative Analysis, Multidimensional scaling, factor analysis, and other methods.  A paper that came out of this project was published in the Spanish Sociological Review, and a book was published from the project and can be found at this link. The paper was also adapted to be included as a chapter in Why Latin American Nations Fail.

I hope you enjoy looking at my website.  If you need to contact me, you can find my contact information in my contact page.  Happy browsing!