Hi, thanks for visiting my hub!

• I’m a PhD student in the Public Health Sciences program at Washington University in St. Louis.
• I study how and why health misinformation spreads on the internet and how to combat it.
• Current projects use social network analysis and visualization and traditional statistics to characterize COVID-19 misinformation networks.
• My dissertation research examines the prevelance and diffusion dynamics of popular COVID-19 misinformation narratives on Black Twitter and is the first in a series that will investigate racial asymmetries in health misinformation
• I'm interested in cross-disciplinary collaborations with experts in public health, information science, communications, digital humanities, and critical media studies.
• mcroston@wustl.edu

On this hub, you'll find data and outputs from my health misinformation studies.

• descriptions
• tweet IDs and other datasets
• code
• slide decks
• manuscripts

Curriculum Vitae

• For more about me, see my current CV here

Education

• MPH, Epidemiology (Emory University)
• BS, Biology (Georgetown University)

Biography

I’m a doctoral student in the Public Health Sciences program at Washington University in St. Louis, a Chancellor’s Graduate fellow and Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin fellow, and an inaugural recipient of the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry’s Tech Impact Network Dissertation Fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles. I have theoretical and applied research interests in how and why health misinformation spreads on the internet and how to combat it. Current projects use social network analysis and traditional statistics to evaluate fact-checking approaches and to explore the ways in which COVID-19 misinformation spreads on Twitter compared to other information types. My dissertation research examines the prevelance and diffusion dynamics of popular COVID-19 misinformation narratives on Black Twitter and is the first in a series that will investigate racial asymmetries in health misinformation.

I have over 10 years of public health experience. Prior to pursuing a PhD, I held positions at agencies such as the Georgia Department of Public Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I earned a Bachelor of Science from Georgetown University and a Master of Public Health in Epidemiology from Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health and am a former Gates Millennium Scholar. Complementary to my research interests, I am devoted to promoting gender and racial diversity in data science and am a co-organizer of RLadies Honolulu.