Ava Sharifi is an MA student at the University of Chicago in the Committee on International Relations and a research supervisor at CPOST. Her master’s thesis utilizes structural topic modeling to analyze over 40,000 news articles published in Iran. Ava began at CPOST in 2019 as a Persian language specialist working on Taliban propaganda. She has since supervised RAs on a number of projects including right wing extremism, civil unrest in the US, and, most recently, the Capitol Hill Insurrectionists Project. She is proficient in Persian and Spanish, and is a recipient of the Turkish Critical Language Scholarship for the summer of 2021. She plans to graduate in spring 2021.