SIM DAD LLC is a communication consulting practice led by Dr. Alex P. Leith, Associate Professor at SIUE. We help organizations audit and strengthen their external communications — websites, press materials, social media, reports — using the same research methods behind 23 peer-reviewed publications. Whether you need a one-time audit or ongoing advisory, we meet you where you are.
We help organizations communicate more effectively with their audiences. Our work is grounded in research methods and data analysis, but the deliverables are practical — clear findings, specific recommendations, and actionable next steps.
We review your external-facing communications — website copy, press releases, social media, reports, email campaigns — and deliver a structured assessment of what is working, what is not, and what to change. Grounded in communication research, not guesswork. Suitable for businesses, nonprofits, and institutions of any size.
Study design, data collection and analysis, survey research, and publication-ready findings. We work with academic teams, nonprofits, media organizations, and companies who need rigorous methods without building an in-house research team.
Available as Co-PI or senior collaborator on federal and foundation grants, particularly NSF programs in HCI, communication, and future-of-work. Established track record: $1.59M awarded, multi-institution consortium managed.
Conference presentations, organizational workshops, and training sessions on social media strategy, communication research methods, and applied data analysis. Tailored to your audience — from executive briefings to hands-on team workshops.
SIM DAD — Social and Interactive Media Data Analysis and Design — is a consulting practice that brings academic research rigor to real-world communication challenges. We started as a research operation, and that foundation shows up in everything we do: structured methods, evidence-based recommendations, and findings that hold up under scrutiny.
Our background is in large-scale data analysis and peer-reviewed research, but our consulting work scales to fit the client. A local business looking to sharpen its public-facing messaging gets the same methodological care as a multi-institution research program. The difference is scope, not rigor.
We also build software tools that grew out of our research work — each available on its own site.
Distributed Raspberry Pi + PostgreSQL pipeline logging 117,943 channels over one month. Source for dissertation and all subsequent Twitch publications.
Demonstrates pipeline-scale data engineering: distributed collection, structured storage, and analysis across a dataset most academic labs cannot build.
1.43M VRChat tweets and 1.41M remote work tweets from 887,888 unique users — structured in PostgreSQL, analyzed via STM and NLP pipelines.
End-to-end NLP pipelines from raw collection through structural topic modeling, at the scale needed for generalizable findings.
Formal data-access agreement with Riot Games to analyze proprietary League of Legends player data. Findings published in peer-reviewed journal.
Demonstrates institutional trust, IRB governance competence, and the ability to negotiate and execute formal agreements with major technology companies.
Led project teams of 4–8 within a 30+ person cross-institutional consortium spanning MSU, SIUE, and 4 partner institutions. 8+ publications.
Demonstrates grant writing success, program leadership, and multi-institution coordination at the consortium level — a track record that speaks to program officers.
Large-scale behavioral surveys on virtual meeting platform adoption, Zoom fatigue, social interaction anxiety, and avatar use across multiple studies.
Population-level survey research at scale — from instrument design through analysis and peer-reviewed publication.
NLP/STM → large-scale survey → semi-structured interviews → controlled experiment → VR prototype user testing. Full mixed-methods pipeline.
Demonstrates full methodological breadth: a single research program spanning computational, survey, qualitative, experimental, and prototype stages.
Tell us what you are working on. Whether it is a communication audit for your business, a research collaboration, or a grant partnership — we respond to every inquiry.
Email is the best way to reach us. Describe what you need and we will get back to you with next steps, a scope estimate, and pricing.
hello@simdadllc.com →We also build software that grew out of our research work. Each product has its own site with full details, demos, and pricing.
Associate Professor of Mass Communications at SIUE. Mixed-methods researcher and data scientist with 10+ years of experience designing studies, analyzing large-scale behavioral datasets, and building the software to support both. NSF Co-PI on a $1.59M award with formal research partnerships at Riot Games and VRChat. Domain expertise in social VR/XR, parasocial media and streaming, virtual meetings and remote work, and NLP and computational text analysis. Alex is available for research consulting, speaking engagements, and grant collaborations in these areas — reach out directly.
Formal data-access agreement to analyze 5M+ proprietary avatar gender choice records from League of Legends. Findings published in peer-reviewed journal.
Established formal platform collaboration for NSF-funded social VR research: 1.4M+ tweets, in-world behavioral data collection, and avatar observation methodology.
Co-founding organizer of a peer-reviewed annual academic conference on XR research, now in its third year (MXR 2026, University of Oregon Portland).
Selected Publications
Full publication list: apleith.github.io
Janet brings a background in business and management alongside extensive professional experience as a paraprofessional. As COO, she serves as the company’s C-level project manager — overseeing daily operations, coordinating cross-functional workstreams, and ensuring project goals are met on time and to standard.