Profile

B.A. Texas A&M University 2011
M.S. Texas A&M University 2014
Ph.D. Texas A&M University 2018

Select Ongoing Projects and Collaborations

• 2024-Present. Research Contractor and Mobile App Data Analyst with the Phoenix: A Sober, Active Community.
• 2024-Present. Co-Investigator with MPIs Lorenzo Lorenzo-Luaces and Johan Bollen. R01. #EverythingSucks: Understanding the bidirectional relations between vulnerability to internalizing symptoms in youth (13-20) and social media content

Scholarly Interest

Dr. Valdez is a big data scientist, primarily leveraging social media data and computational informatics algorithms to study, visualize, and interpret applied health behaviors, including mental health markers from social media data, persuasive digital marketing, sexual health attitudes, and misinformation's effect on positive health outcomes.

Dr. Valdez is currently accepting doctoral students with a background or interest in applied social media mining, digital health, and associated analytics.

Valdez, D., ten Thij, M., Bathina, K.C., Rutter, L.A., and Bollen, J. (2020) Social-media insights into US mental health amid the COVID-19 global pandemic: a Longitudinal analysis of publicly available Twitter data (January 22- April 10, 2020). Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR). 22(12):e21418.

Valdez, D., Pickett, A.C., Young, B.R., & Golden, S. (2021). On mining words: the Utility of topic models in health education research and practice. Health Promotion Practice. 22(3), 309-12. Impact Factor: 1.35. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/152483992199905

Valdez, D., Patterson, M., & Prochnow MEd, T. (2021). The importance of interdisciplinary frameworks in social media mining: An exploratory approach between Computational Informatics and Social Network Analysis (SNA). Health Behavior Research, 4(2), 4.

Valdez, D., & Unger, J. B. (2021). Difficulty Regulating Social Media Content of Age-Restricted Products: Comparing JUUL's Official Twitter Timeline and Social Media Content About JUUL. JMIR Infodemiology, 1(1), e29011.

Bathina, K. C., Ten Thij, M., Valdez, D., Rutter, L. A., & Bollen, J. (2021). Declining well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic reveals US social inequities. PloS one, 16(7), e0254114.

Valdez, D., Jozkowski, K. N., Haus, K., Ten Thij, M., Crawford, B. L., Montenegro, M. S., ... & Bollen, J. (2022). Assessing rigid modes of thinking in self-declared abortion ideology: natural language processing insights from an online pilot qualitative study on abortion attitudes. Pilot and Feasibility Studies, 8(1), 1-14

Edinger, A., Valdez, D., Walsh-Buhi, E.R., and Bollen, J. (In-Press). Deep learning for topical trend discovery in online discourse about Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP).. Aids and Behavior.

Valdez, D., Soto-Vásquez, A. D., & Montenegro, M. S. (2023). Geospatial vaccine misinformation risk on social media: Online insights from an English/Spanish natural language processing (NLP) analysis of vaccine-related tweets. Social Science & Medicine, 339, 116365.

Rao, V. K., Valdez, D., Muralidharan, R., Agley, J., Eddens, K. S., Dendukuri, A., ... & Parker, M. A. (2024). Digital epidemiology of prescription drug references on x (formerly twitter): Neural network topic modeling and sentiment analysis. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 26, e57885.

Russell, A. M., Valdez, D., Wang, M., Allem, J. P., Bergman, B. G., Kelly, J. F., ... & Massey, P. M. (2025). Content analysis of substance use disorder recovery discourse on Twitter: From personal recovery narratives to marketing of addiction treatment. Alcohol: Clinical and Experimental Research, 49(3), 629-640.