About Me

I am a media researcher and postdoctoral research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ). I currently work on the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, the world’s largest international comparative survey of the major trends in digital news consumption. Previously, I worked on the Trust in News Project, a comparative and mixed-methods research project that sought to understand the drivers of trust in news media in Brazil, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. You can find the reports we published from that project here.

I have extensive experience with a variety of qualitative methodologies, including digital and traditional ethnography, interviewing, focus groups, and content analysis. In addition, I have experience with survey methodology, and have collaborated on teams using a variety of quantitative methods. I also have ample experience conducting cross-national, comparative research.

I completed my PhD in the Media, Technology, and Society program at Northwestern University in March of 2020. Before starting my position at the RISJ, I worked as a research associate with Dr. Pablo J. Boczkowski on a project examining news coverage about eating disorders and new media technologies in Latin America, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Broadly, my research is concerned with the uptake and increasingly central role of media technologies and digital platforms, and how these shifts shape social life and culture. My research interests include media, technology, digital platforms, journalism, mental health, gender, and their intersections. My dissertation was fundamentally interdisciplinary, drawing on scholarship from STS, medical sociology, and media studies among others to examine the rise of a proposed diagnosis called orthorexia nervosa. One particular interest driving this project was understanding the role of media (both news and social media) in the production and circulation of knowledge(s), including the relationship between medical knowledge and lived (and embodied) experience. I have published four papers based on my dissertation research (for more, see Publications). In my previous research, I also explored the evolution of news production values online. (Download my CV)

I have also conducted comparative qualitative research looking at the interplay between digital platforms and cultural industries. In one study, I worked on with colleagues at the University of Costa Rica, and published in the Journal of Cultural Economy, we analyzed how musicians in Latin America make sense of and navigate the increasingly prominent role of playlists on Spotify. In another study carried out at the Reuters Institute and published in in Journalism Studies, we examined how journalists across four countries think about the impact of digital platforms on audience trust.

During my time on the Trust in News Project, I have had the opportunity to work on multiple studies using a variety of methodologies, including two large scale qualitative studies which I led on. This research led to 8 public-facing reports and 5 peer-reviewed publications (see Publications) with several others under review or in progress.

Before obtaining my MA at Northwestern University in December of 2015, I worked for five years as a print and online journalist for the Costa Rican newspaper La Nación.  I had the opportunity to cover a broad array of topics including education, minorities, vulnerable social groups, and culture. I was born and raised in Costa Rica, and I am fully bilingual in English and Spanish. Outside of my work, I enjoy spending time with friends, listening to music, cooking, reading, and digging my feet into the sand (or the closest thing I have available).