Dr. Megan Stubbs-Richardson is an Assistant Research Professor at the Social Science Research Center (SSRC) of Mississippi State University. She co-directs the Data Science for Social Sciences Laboratory at the SSRC and is leading one of the missions of the laboratory to identify victimization patterns via social media analytics. Megan has been a PI or Co-PI on projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institute of Justice (NIJ), and the Department of Defense (DoD). She has been conducting social media data analyses at the SSRC since 2012. In her research, she uses publicly available information to identify crime patterns and trends for gender-based violence and crime prevention techniques. She is currently leading a team to identify emotions expressed online surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic as well as exposure to misinformation and counter misinformation using 10 social media and forum platforms for an NSF funded project.
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8636-497XContribution to Project: Dr. Stubbs-Richardson oversaw the project goals and responsibilities and led bi-weekly meetings that were scheduled for the full team. Dr. Stubbs-Richardson also ensured Responsible Conduct in Research training requirements were met by the full team. She also worked with legal and other personnel on the appropriate handling of data in preparation for sharing the COPE-ID database.
Additionally, throughout the course of this project, Dr. Stubbs-Richardson supervised and mentored three undergraduate students (Georgiana Swan, Shelby Gilbreath, and Deborah Tolbert) who worked on various aspects of the project, such as literature reviews, data codification, building databases of keywords for search criteria, and writing on manuscripts. Meetings with each student were held on a weekly basis to discuss progress or best approaches to tasks needed for the project.
Dr. Stubbs-Richardson led on and oversaw the methods documentation for the 10 platforms which was uploaded to the COPE-ID database along with the data. She also co-led a team of students with Sujan on the removal of sensitive data from the final COPE-ID database. Finally, Dr. Stubbs-Richardson is lead author on both the misinformation study as well as the database paper which involved working closely with other team members often on a weekly basis to meet those two objectives.