Keith Cox, PhDBehavioral Researcher & Conversational AI Designer
Portrait of Keith Cox

About

I’m a behavioral researcher and conversation analyst with a PhD in Sociology from UCLA. For a decade I’ve studied how specific interactional choices shape trust, resistance, adherence, and outcomes, with multiple peer-reviewed publications, mostly in high-stakes medical settings.

I also build stuff. I ship real, live software (not just research findings), including a conference planning app that an international research conference adopted and promoted over its own official app, and a real-time multiplayer scoring platform with live state sync. I like working at the intersection of behavioral research and hands-on technical execution, and I’m currently focused on roles where that combination is the point: AI experience evaluation, conversation design, and product design grounded in how people actually communicate.

Areas of Expertise

Conversation & Behavioral Research

  • Conversation analysis (turn-taking, sequence organization, repair)
  • Trust, resistance, & communication breakdown
  • Research design & execution
  • Large audiovisual dataset analysis
  • Communication in medical care
  • IRB-governed human-subjects research

AI / LLM Practice

  • Prompt engineering & LLM evaluation
  • Agentic prototyping (Claude Code, Claude API)
  • Behavioral theory → AI evaluation frameworks
  • Local LLM experimentation & RAG

Product & Collaboration

  • Project management
  • Discovery, requirements, & framework design
  • Conversation design (trust-building, repair, affiliation)
  • Cross-functional stakeholder communication
  • Solo end-to-end delivery (design → deploy)

Experience

  1. Subject-Matter Expert

    2026–Present

    Aligned Labs, Inc.

    Training, evaluating, and pressure-testing leading AI models on expert-level sociological knowledge, creating and verifying graduate-level questions and explanations, and assessing whether AI-generated reasoning meets the standards of a trained expert.

  2. Postdoc Fellow

    2024–2026

    George Washington University, School of Medicine & Health Sciences

    Defined the scope of an interdisciplinary research program on decision making, built its coding scheme, ELAN annotation template, and SOP documentation, and coordinated clinicians, measurement scientists, and analysts. Analyzed 35 hours of video-recorded inpatient rehabilitation sessions into a process model of decision making under emergent practical problems. Leading the co-authored manuscript translating those findings into actionable recommendations (in progress).

  3. Teaching Fellow

    2023–2024

    UCLA, Department of Sociology

    Taught Communication in Medical Care, Conversational Structures, Talk & Social Institutions, and Medical Sociology.

  4. Program Coordinator

    2020–2022

    UCLA Center for Language, Interaction, & Culture

    Coordinated interdisciplinary programming for an academic research center: cross-functional program management spanning faculty, graduate researchers, and visiting scholars.

  5. Teaching Associate

    2017–2020

    UCLA, Department of Sociology

    Taught Introduction to Sociological Research Methods, Talk & Social Institutions, Conversational Structures, Introduction to Sociology, Contemporary Sociological Theory, and Social Networks.

  6. Website Manager

    2011–2018

    International Society for Conversation Analysis

    Designed and managed the organization’s website for seven years. Developed and deployed a production registration and accommodation-booking system for the 2014 International Conference on Conversation Analysis, the earliest evidence of the “researcher who also ships software” thread that runs through the rest of this timeline.