Brian is a Ph.D. Candidate at North Carolina State University in the interdisciplinary Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media (CRDM) program. His research focuses on the intersection of AI, new digital technologies, and the communication of asymmetric Influence Operations. While in the program, Brian has focused on the communicative construction of the Islamic State organization via online propaganda, analyzing the generic ecologies of Islamic State magazines, argument structures and the pragmatics of narrative in Al-Qaeda propagandists’ speech, as well as the meta-textual and interdiscursive nature of online hitlists produced by right-wing stochastic terrorists. Previous work has also looked at the centrality of “martyred” propagandists as a resonant node in Actor-Networks, computational linguistic analysis of Islamic State Newspapers, and the computational phonetics of lying.

Brian has also worked with the Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium as a Senior Intelligence Analyst, focusing on the real-world use of OSINT and new digital techniques to report on the Islamic State’s global operations. He also entered into an intensive one-year virtual Research and Policy Analyst internship with the Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), where he studied the impact of AI and Influence Operations at the nexus of human rights and democracy.

• Crossing Names off the List: An Examination of Terrorgram’s Hitlist. Terrorism and Social Media (TASM), June 2024, Swansea, Wales. Conference Session.
• Extreme arguments: Jihadist argumentation in the sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki. PhilArg at PhilLang 2021. May 2021. University of Lodz, Poland. Presentation.
• I didn’t do it: An acoustic analysis of deceitful speech. Student Research Symposium, 9 Nov 2019. University of South Carolina. Presentation.
• More than words: Forensic uses of Multi-Dimensional analysis. Student Research Symposium, 9 Nov 2019. University of South Carolina. Columbia, South Carolina. Presentation.
• I didn’t do it: An acoustic analysis of deceitful speech. UNC Linguistics Spring Colloquium, 6 April 2018, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Poster.
• Mulid without a Saint: Bakhtinian carnivalesque as applied to Tahrir Square.” UNC Asian Studies Seniors Honors Thesis Colloquium. 15 April 2013. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Presentation.
• Wonder women: Representations of women on superhero comic book covers,” Comics and Popular Arts Conference. 4 Sep 2011. Atlanta, Georgia. Presentation.
• Visual villainy: Constructing the image of the comic book villain,” Annual meeting of Phi Theta Kappa, Durham Technical Community College, 5 April 2012.  Durham, North Carolina. Presentation.

• VoxPol: Academic Research Network on Online Extremism (2025 – Current)
• US Department of State Information Integrity Rights Review (2023 – 2024)
• Sandia National Labs AI & Disinformation (2022)
• Forensic Linguistics Lab. Department of Linguistics, UNC Chapel Hill (2018-2020)
• Forensic Linguistic Consultant, Radical Extremist Research (RExR) Team, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill, North Carolina. (2018 – 2025)