Guests of Data Analytics Colloquium

Andrew Q. Philips

Andrew Q. Philips is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. He regularly teaches political methodology courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels on topics in econometrics, research design, data visualization, maximum likelihood estimators, machine learning, time series, and panel data. For several years he has taught courses on panel data and time series in summer schools in methodology at the University of Michigan and the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. His research interests revolve around political methodology and political economy, and has appeared in venues such as the American Journal of Political Science, Political Science Research and Methods, Political Research Quarterly, and Public Choice. He also has published a number of software programs in venues like the The R Journal and The Stata Journal. He received his Ph.D from Texas A&M University in 2017.

Anton Sobolev

Anton Sobolev is an Assistant Professor of Political Economy and Cyber Policy at the University of Texas at Dallas. His research studies questions of politics using text analysis, machine learning, and causal inference. His recent projects focus on mass protest, cybersecurity, and political control in autocracies. More broadly, he studies how digital technology shapes political and economic behavior. His work has been published in American Political Science Review, World Politics, European Journal of Political Economy, Post-Soviet Affairs, Europe-Asia Studies, and Problems of Post-Communism. Dr. Sobolev received his Ph.D. in Political Science and M.Sc. in Statistics from the University of California, Los Angeles. Before coming to UTD, he was a postdoctoral associate in the Leitner Program in Political Economy at Yale University.

Chen Qiu

Chen Qiu is an assistant professor from Department of Economics, Cornell University. He is an econometrician, and his research interests are in causal inference, treatment choice and statistical decision theory. Chen received his PhD from London School of Economics and was a post-doctoral fellow at University College London and Institute of Fiscal Studies prior to joining Cornell.

Chris Wlezien

Christopher Wlezien is Hogg Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, and holds or has held positions – both permanent and visiting – at various universities in the United States and other countries. He has published numerous articles and chapters as well as a number of books, including Degrees of Democracy, The Timeline of Elections, Who Gets Represented? and, most recently, Information and Democracy: Public Policy in the News. More information about his teaching, research, datasets, and service is available on his website: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/government/faculty/cw26629

Christopher Achen

Chris Achen holds the Roger Williams Straus Chair of Social Sciences at Princeton University. His primary research interests are public opinion, elections, and the realities of democratic politics. He is the author or co-author of six books, including Democracy for Realists (with Larry Bartels) in 2016, which won two international awards, was the subject of a special edition of Critical Review, and was reviewed in Foreign Affairs, The Economist, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. He is also the coauthor and coeditor (with T.Y. Wang) of The Taiwan Voter (2017). He has published many articles. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has received fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Science Foundation, and Princeton’s Center for the Study of Democratic Politics. He was the founding president of the Political Methodology Society, and he received the first career achievement award from The Political Methodology Section of The American Political Science Association in 2007. He has served on the top social science board at the American National Science Foundation, and he was the chair of the national Council for the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) from 2013-2015. What he is proudest of are awards from the University of Michigan for lifetime achievement in training graduate students and a student-initiated award from Princeton University for graduate student mentoring.

Colin Lewis-Beck

Colin Lewis-Beck is Visiting Assistant Professor of the University of Iowa Department of Statistics & Actuarial Science. He is the co-author of Applied Regression: An Introduction, Second Edition (Sage Publications, 2015) and his works have been published in Remote Sensing, Technometrics, Journal of Agricultural and Biological Statistics, Preference and Adherence and Value in Health.

Guy D. Whitten

Dr. Whitten’s primary research and teaching interests are political economy, political methodology, comparative politics, and public policy. Much of his published research has involved cross-national comparative studies of the influence of economics on government popularity and elections. In addition, he has been studying political budgeting with an emphasis on government behavior over policy tradeoffs. Dr. Whitten has published a number of influential works on the use of statistics to make inferences in the social sciences. Together with Paul Kellstedt, he has written a textbook titled The Fundamentals of Political Science Research (Cambridge University Press 2009, 2013, 2018; Portuguese version published by Blucher 2015). He is a co-editor of the Cambridge University Press book series Methodological Tools in the Social Sciences and currently serves on the editorial boards of Political Analysis and Political Science and Research Methods.

Harold D. Clarke

Harold D. Clarke, Ph.D. Duke University, is Ashbel Smith Professor, University of Texas at Dallas. He has served as editor of Electoral Studies and the Political Research Quarterly and as Director of Social and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (US), the Economics and Social Research Council (UK), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canada Council, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Hong Kong Science Foundation. He is the author of articles in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, the British Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, International Studies Quarterly, Political Analysis and Political Science Research and Methods. He is a co-author of Absent Mandate - Strategies and Choices in Canadian Elections (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019), Brexit - Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Austerity and Political Choice in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Affluence, Austerity and Electoral Change in Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2013). A new book Brexit Britain is scheduled to be published with Cambridge University Press.

Jake Bowers

Jake Bowers (http://jakebowers.org) is an associate professor of political science and statistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He is Methods Director for the Evidence in Government and Politics network (http://egap.org) and co-founder of Research4Impact (http://r4impact.org) and the Causal Inference for Social Impact Lab (https://casbs.stanford.edu/programs/causal-inference-social-impact-lab). He worked on behavioral science approaches to evidence-based public policy in the US Federal Government as a Fellow on the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team (http://sbst.gov) and Office of Evaluation Sciences (http://oes.gsa.gov), and in the state and local government as a Senior Scientist with The Policy Lab (http://thepolicylab.brown.edu). His research in applied statistics and political methodology focuses on questions about statistical inference for causal effects in randomized experiments and observational studies. He has collaborated in the study of behavior and attitude change in studies of geographic perceptions in Canada and the UK, taxation in Malawi, media effects in Nigeria, attitudes towards marijuana use in Uruguay, and political participation in the USA.