Sarah is an M.A/Ph.D. student in UC Santa Barbara’s Communication department. She received her B.S in Cognitive Science from UC Santa Cruz in 2024 where she also minored in Statistics. Her research explores the impacts of affordances on social media platforms, such as infinite scroll, closed groups, and algorithmic recommendation and censorship systems. She seeks to understand how they affect the dissemination of information, with a particular focus on the spread of health information and misinformation. Sarah is also interested in how these same affordances impact users' trust in technology-curated sources of information, such as chatbots, voice assistants, and algorithmically generated search results.
B.S. (2024), University of California Santa Cruz, Cognitive Science with an emphasis in Human Computer Interaction and Algorithms