Hi, I'm Nazanin.
I'm a Computer Science PhD student at the University of California, San Diego, advised by Dr. Kristen Vaccaro and Dr. Mai ElSherief.
My research broadly sits at the intersection of Online Safety, Human-Computer Interaction, and Computational Social Science. I study online communities, content moderation, and audits of platform features such as targeted advertising.
Before UCSD, I completed my master's and bachelor's degree at the University of Tehran.
News
April 2026
UCR FAME Workshop: I recieved an award at the UCR FAME workshop (15% acceptance rate).
October 2025
CSCW 2025 Honorable Mention: Our paper "The Balancing Act of Social Audio Facilitators: When Self-Promotion Overshadows Community Care" recieved an honorable mention in CSCW 2025.
September 2025
The Trust and Safety Research Conference 2025 Honorable Mention: My lightning talk on "Designing for Facilitation and Moderation in Ephemeral Social Media Spaces" at the T&S conference recieved an honorable mention.
Summer 2025
Completed a research internship at NYU with Dr. Rosanna Bellini.
April 2023
Presented our work "Challenges of Moderating Social Virtual Reality" at CHI 2023.
Research
Publications
NLP for Social Good: A Survey and Outlook of Challenges, Opportunities and Responsible Deployment
"He gets to be the fun parent": Understanding and Supporting Burnt-Out Mothers in Online Communities
The Balancing Act of Social Audio Facilitators: When Self-Promotion Overshadows Community Care
Are LLMs Empathetic to All? Investigating the Influence of Multi-Demographic Personas on a Model's Empathy
Public Health Messaging on Twitter During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Observational Study
The Double Burden of Moderators: Safeguarding Communities While Facing Identity-Based Harassment
Posting Patterns of Members of Parental Subreddits
Inferring Mental Burnout Discourse Across Reddit Communities
Challenges of Moderating Social Virtual Reality
Consistent range approximation for fair predictive modeling
Gender Pay Gap in Sports on a Fan-Request Celebrity Video Site
Quantitative analysis of fanfictions' popularity
Exploring the Similarities of Iranian Influencers with Regards to Content, Relationships and Interactions with Users
Persian Emotion Detection using ParsBERT and Imbalanced Data Handling Approaches
Sentiment Analysis of Persian-English Code-mixed Texts
Examining Global Mobile Diffusion and Mobile Gender Gaps through Facebook's Advertising Data
Leveraging Bias in Pre-Trained Word Embeddings for Unsupervised Microaggression Detection
A Global Book Reading Dataset
EmoPars: A Collection of 30K Emotion-Annotated Persian Social Media Texts
UTNLP at SemEval-2021 Task 5: A Comparative Analysis of Toxic Span Detection using Attention-based, Named Entity Recognition, and Ensemble Models
An Analysis of GitLab's Users and Projects Networks
A cross-country study on cultural similarities based on book preferences
Emad at SemEval-2019 Task 6: Offensive language identification using traditional machine learning and deep learning approaches
Community
Service
Reviewing
- ACM CHI (2026)
- ACM CSCW (2024)
- ICWSM (2024, 2026)
- WOAH (2024)
- UIST (2024)
- Journal of Social Network Analysis and Mining (2026)
Mentorship
- Mentoring undergraduate students in research projects.
- Mentoring master's students as part of the CSE Women in Computing (UCSD)
Department & Lab Service
- Design Lab DISCO
- University of Tehran's ACM Chapter
Talks
- University of California Riverside (2026)
- The Trust and Safety Research Conference (2025)
- CHI paper presentation (2023)
Presentations
Posters
Research Expo 2026
Reading into Conversations: A Facilitator-Centered Exploration of Visualizing Conversation Metrics
UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering's 44th annual Research Expo (2026)
Research Expo 2025
Social Audio Facilitators: Balancing Self-Promotion & Community Care
UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering's 43rd annual Research Expo (2025)
NLP4PI · EMNLP 2024
Inferring Mental Burnout Discourse Across Reddit Communities
NLP for Positive Impact Workshop · EMNLP 2024
Curriculum Vitae
CV
Education
2021–present
PhD, Computer Science
University of California, San Diego
Advisors: Dr. Kristen Vaccaro & Dr. Mai ElSherief
2019–2021
MSc, Artificial Intelligence
University of Tehran
2015–2019
BSc, Computer Engineering
University of Tehran
Experience
Summer 2025
Visiting Researcher
New York University (Mentor: Dr. Rosanna Bellini)
Summer 2023
Visiting Researcher
University of Southern California (Mentor: Dr. Kristina Lerman)
Summer 2022
Data Science Intern
Eluvio
2020–2023
Research Assistant
Mentor: Dr. Ingmar Weber
Awards & Honors
2026
Future Academics & Mentorship Excellence (FAME) Program