I’m currently a graduate student in the computer science department at Princeton University, where I’m fortunate to be advised by Jonathan Mayer. I’m grateful for the support of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. My research is animated by a fascination with the news and the people who make and read it. Recent areas of interest include private analytics, hybrid approaches to fact-checking, and online speech & identity.
I’ll be spending the summer of 2025 working at CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University.
I was a visiting researcher at MIT’s Internet Policy Research Initiative (IPRI) in the 2024-2025 academic year.
Before grad school, I worked as a fact checker and editorial producer at The New Yorker, where I collaborated with writers and editors on stories for the print and digital editions of the magazine, built page layouts, and contributed capsule book reviews. I still occasionally take on book-length fact-checking projects, as interest and availability allow!
In other lives, I’ve researched marine invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History, reviewed submissions to the Quarterly at McSweeney’s, and reported on infectious disease research at the National Institutes of Health.
Say hello: madelyne at alumni dot stanford dot edu.
I’m @madxiaodisease in some places and Madelyne everywhere else.
things I’m thinking about:
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who, then, is the fact checker?
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Joan Acocella on Mikhail Baryshnikov and Janet Malcolm on Yuja Wang;
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innate number sense in the non-human animal kingdom;
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oulipo and constrained writing – the subject of an honors thesis that I started and never completed;
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drop me a line if you’re down for a cross;
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the MIT Puzzle Hunt was remote in 2021;