About BRIC Co-Founder Ericka Menchen-Trevino

In 2009, I applied for a National Science Foundation grant to fund my dissertation research on political polarization. I proposed creating software to collect web browsing data, as well as designing surveys and conducting in-depth interviews before the 2010 election. The proposal was rejected in part because the reviewers thought it would be impossible to complete. I found other sources of funding and successfully completed the project. As soon it was clear I could actually collect the data, I felt like I could float across Northwestern’s campus. This was my first experience designing research software and collecting digital traces of online behavior. It was also my first collaboration with my classmate and programmer, Chris Karr, who was instrumental in implementing the project.

This initial project led to a journal article about the software, the completion of my dissertation, and helped launch my academic career. As the Web evolved, I decided to learn JavaScript and, in 2018, implemented a new approach to collecting web data that addressed some of the persistent questions from my earlier work. That project attracted the attention of future collaborators, and I used it in several studies published in leading journals between 2021 and 2023 (see my Google Scholar profile). In the largest of these projects, I used this software to collect survey and web data from over 7,000 participants across 3 countries, while continuing to work with Chris Karr and use his open-source data collection server.

My software projects led to global collaborations and influenced the development of additional software for social science research. I see the potential for many uses of my software to address research questions well beyond my sub-field of political communication. However, even within political communication, using web browsing traces or digital traces of behavior in any form remains uncommon. I was fortunate to collaborate on a guide to web browsing data, working with colleagues around the world to expand the accessibility of web data in social science. Norms change very slowly in research methods, and progress is quite uneven, particularly when important advances remain buried in an appendix, only for another scholar to re-invent the wheel.

Despite the potential for innovative software to advance social science research, there is little incentive within academia to support, maintain, and improve such tools beyond the initial launch and publication. I have seen this in my own work and across fields. The commercial market for transparent, reproducible research software in the social sciences is small and serves only the most well-resourced researchers. 

To address this, we are co-founding the Behavioral Research Innovation Center (BRIC), a nonprofit organization, to maximize our impact on scientific innovation and knowledge expansion in the social and behavioral sciences. Our mission is to create and support innovative software, making it accessible and easy to use, offering training and support, and demonstrating its utility across various disciplines. One of our aims is for students in developing countries to use the same leading computational tools and techniques as top research labs. 

I am excited to be involved in new disciplines, particularly the important work in psychology that Chris Karr has been doing for many years. I believe it is critically important to address mental health challenges with evidence-based solutions and to strive to mitigate the damage caused by surveillance-capitalism-based technologies. I am also eager to develop new technologies as we learn what new AI systems are capable (and incapable) of accomplishing, and how to deploy them ethically and responsibly. Also, I look forward to creating a community around this work.

We aspire to build a diverse global community of researchers and developers. In this newsletter, we will highlight advances in computational methods across the social and behavioral sciences. Additionally, we aim to document the crucial process of creating usable and responsible infrastructure based on innovations, preventing the reinvention of the wheel. And of course, we will provide updates on the BRIC organization’s projects and initiatives. If you’re interested in following our journey, please subscribe. If you have any thoughts or questions please reach out to me: my first name at bricenter.org.