You never forget cold weather after living in South Bend for two years :)
You never forget cold weather after living in South Bend for two years :)

Hi — I’m Moeen Mostafavi, a computational social scientist and data scientist focused on NLP, machine learning, and decision support at the intersection of social systems, finance, and safety/health.

I earned my Ph.D. in Systems & Information Engineering at the University of Virginia, where my dissertation, Enhancing Emotion Understanding in Messaging Interactions, integrated transformer models with Affect Control Theory to model affective dynamics in digital communication (see my paper in Sociological Methodology, 2024). I’ve also led and collaborated on interdisciplinary projects spanning political analytics, telematics-based fleet safety, RFID + haptics for collision prediction in contact sports, and technology-enabled sleep tracking in older adults.

I currently work at the Virginia Retirement System (VRS), applying ML and large-scale data analysis to mortgage-backed securities and fixed-income research. Earlier work received support from Jefferson Trust (fleet safety) and ARO W911NF1710509 (emotion modeling with contextual embeddings, coauthored), and I previously held grants/fellowships from INSF and others.

I care deeply about inclusive, hands-on teaching. At UVA I supported courses in Exploratory Text Analytics, Statistical Modeling, and Business Analysis; student and peer recognition includes the Robert T. Ferguson III Memorial Award. I enjoy building short, “just-in-time” primers, annotated notebooks, and flexible mentoring structures that help students from diverse backgrounds succeed.

Links:
• Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=BtO9RngAAAAJ&hl=en
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/moeenmostafavi
• Selected publications:
– Sociological Methodology article: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00811750241260729
– UMAP paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3450613.3459661
– IEEE SysCon (emoji/embeddings): https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9447137
– IEEE SysCon (campaign metrics): https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9483746
– AHFE (RFID + haptics): https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-80091-8_47
– Alzheimer’s & Dementia (sleep tech): https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/alz.038831