I'm an incoming assistant professor in the Department of Politics & International Affairs at Wake Forest University. My research explores the factors shaping Americans' information diets and how news-consumption decisions affect downstream political attitudes and behavior, including the tendency to believe mis- and disinformation. 

My dissertation examines political elites' ability to shape Americans’ perceptions of the news media. In my job market paper, I apply state-of-the-art natural language processing tools to more than eight decades of congressional floor speeches to examine how elite rhetoric affects trust in the news media. In a separate part of my dissertation, I critically reexamine the origins and evolution of American journalism's professionalization in the context of a fluid conception of First Amendment press freedoms to posit a novel theory for why journalism in the United States is uniquely susceptible to elite attempts to delegitimize it.

I received my PhD from the Government Department at Harvard University in 2026, where I was an affiliate of the Center for American Political Studies and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. I have a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Cornell University and an M.A. in Media and Strategic Communications from The George Washington University. Prior to pursuing my PhD, I worked as a senior web editor at POLITICO, overseeing a team of copy editors and digital producers and guest writing the Influence newsletter covering lobbying and money in politics.

When I'm not hunched over my laptop, I like to play piano, cook Mediterranean food, and go on long runs. I live in Winston-Salem, N.C., with my lovely wife Ashley and our two adorable tortoiseshell cats.

I can be reached at beaverd@wfu.edu. You can find my CV here.