Alina Arseniev-Koehler

I am a computational social scientist who studies health, culture, and social categorization (e.g., gender, body weight, illness). I am especially interested in the role of cultural meaning in health and medicine. I am specialized in computational approaches to work with text data, including word embedding and topic modeling.  

Currently I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Purdue University. I completed a postdoctoral fellowship in biomedical informatics at UC San Diego, funded by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in June 2024.  This postdoctoral training enabled me to bridge sociological perspectives on health and culture with the problems addressed by biomedical informatics (e.g., unlocking cultural determinants of health in clinical note data and demographic disparities in diagnosis).

I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA in 2022, and my B.A. in Sociology from the University of Washington in 2014. Prior to graduate training at UCLA, I conducted research on social media and health at the Seattle Children's Hospital and Research Institute. 

In addition to conducting research, I am invested in computational social science pedagogy and the computational social science community. I co-organized and taught in the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science (SICSS) at UCLA in 2019, 2020, and 2021.  I also taught Introduction to Statistics in Sociology (SOC 382) at Purdue University in Fall 2024. 

Contact me: aaashelm at purdue.edu