Alvarado will join the first cohort of the United Nations Global Pulse initiative, which works to promote awareness of the opportunities big data presents for sustainable development and humanitarian action. 

“As a UN Data Fellow, I am looking forward to working with an interdisciplinary team and learning from researchers and practitioners’ experiences when designing for constrained contexts,” Alvarado says. 

In her research, Alvarado is looking into the relationship between communities and the collective production of data. In this context, she is interested in the role of local capabilities and expertise coming from citizens.

By understanding how data and community practices of citizens may contribute to the work of NGOs, Alvarado is seeking to build better tools to inform on-the-ground efforts to address issues of public safety and political reform through data synthesis and analysis.

The School of Literature, Media, and Communication is a unit of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.