Sara Francisco

Sara Francisco received her PhD in Sociology and Social Data Analytics from the Pennsylvania State University. Her research and teaching interests include studying the intersections between gender and race/ethnicity, health disparities, and quantitative methods. Her research often uses a myriad of quantitative methods to explore and extract information from big data (e.g., social network analysis, GIS, sentiment analysis, text analysis, machine learning). Francisco’s current projects focus on the Black Lives Matter movement, aggression toward minority women on social media, and racial health disparities. Francisco’s dissertation, entitled “Hashing it Out: Racial Conversations and Harassment on Social Media” explores attitudes toward pivotal social issues related to race and considers how individuals communicate, react, and engage in conversations about racial inequality within the social media platform, Twitter.

Francisco can be helpful to students who:

• Want to use quantitative methods to conduct original research
• Have interests in big data
• Interests in intersectional research related to gender and race/ethnicity
• Interests in interdisciplinary work/methodology

Degrees:

Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University, Sociology and Social Data Analytics, 2022

M.A., Pennsylvania State University, Sociology, 2018

B.A., Mount Holyoke College, Mathematics and History, 2016