List of guest speakers at the Data Analytics Colloquium
At American University Jeff Gill is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Government and the the Department of Mathematics & Statistics, as well as a member of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at American University and founding director of theCenter for Data Science. He has done extensive work in the development of Bayesian hierarchical models, nonparametric Bayesian models, elicited prior development from expert interviews, as well in fundamental issues in statistical inference. Current applied work includes: blood and circulation physiology including how our bodies change these dynamics in times of stress such as injury, long-term mental health outcomes from children’s exposure to war, pediatric head trauma, analysis of terrorism data, survey research methodologies, and spatial analysis of social and biomedical conditions.
Jim Granato, Dean and Professor, Hobby School of Public Affairs
A native of the south side of Chicago, Granato serves as dean of the Hobby School of Public Affairs and is a University of Houston Energy Fellow. Prior to the Hobby School, Granato taught at the University of Texas and in the department of Political Science at Michigan State University. His teaching and research interests include American politics, political economy, public policy, econometrics and the unification of formal and empirical analysis. His professional experience also includes service as the political science program director and visiting scientist at the National Science Foundation (NSF) where he helped develop and implement research and education training reforms in quantitative analysis, foremost was the Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models (EITM) initiative. Granato is the author or co-author of numerous publications in academic journals such as American Journal of Political Science, Economics and Politics, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Macroeconomic Dynamics, Political Analysis, Political Research Quarterly, Public Choice and the Southern Economic Journal. Other samples of his research can be found in the books, The Role of Policymakers in Business Cycle Fluctuations and The Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models in Political Science — both published by Cambridge University Press.
King-wa FU is a Professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre (JMSC), The University of Hong Kong. His research interests include China’s information governance, media and political participation, computational social sciences, health and the media, and younger generation’s media use. He was a visiting Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab and Fulbright-RGC Hong Kong Senior Research Scholar in 2016-2017 and a China-US Scholar 2021-2022. He is the Principle Investigator of Weiboscope, WeChatscope, and ANTIELAB Research Data Archive. He was a journalist at the Hong Kong Economic Journal before turning to academia. His online CV: http://sites.google.com/site/fukingwa/
Kosuke Imai is professor in the Department of Government and the Department of Statistics at Harvard University. Before moving to Harvard in 2018, Imai taught at Princeton University for 15 years where he was the founding director of the Program in Statistics and Machine Learning. He has extensively worked on the development and applications of statistical methods for causal inference with experimental and observational data. Other areas of his methodological research are survey methodology and computational algorithms for data-intensive social science research. Imai served as the President of the Society for Political Methodology from 2017 to 2019. He is the author of an introductory statistics textbook for social science students, Quantitative Social Science: An Introduction (Princeton University Press, 2017).
Larry M. Bartels holds the May Werthan Shayne Chair of Public Policy and Social Science at Vanderbilt University. His scholarship and teaching focus broadly on American democracy, including public opinion, electoral politics, public policy, and political representation. His most recent books are Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (2nd edition) and Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (with Christopher Achen). He is also the author of numerous scholarly articles and of occasional pieces in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other media outlets. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
Matthew Lebo’s research focuses on national level politics in the United States – political parties in Congress, the presidency, and elections – including the strategic decisions political parties must make to balance electoral and legislative goals. He also studies research methodology and time series analysis and has additional interests in British politics, election forecasting, and Scottish independence.
Michael S. Lewis-Beck is F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Iowa. His interests are comparative elections, election forecasting, political economy, and quantitative methodology. Professor Lewis-Beck has authored or co-authored over 300 articles and books, including Economics and Elections, The American Voter Revisited, French Presidential Elections, Forecasting Elections, The Austrian Vote, Latin American Elections: Choice and Change and Applied Regression. He has served as Editor of the American Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies, and the Sage QASS series (the green monographs) in quantitative methods. Currently he is past Associate Editor of International Journal of Forecasting and current Associate Editor French Politics. In addition to his position at Iowa, he has held various positions abroad including, more recently, Visiting Professor, GESIS, University of Mannheim; Paul Lazersfeld University Professor at the University of Vienna; Visiting Professor at Center for Citizenship and Democracy, University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium; Visiting Professor at LUISS University, Rome; Visiting Senior Scholar, Political Science, University of Aarhus, Denmark. michael-lewis-beck@uiowa.edu
Patrick T. Brandt is Professor of Public Policy, and Political Economy, and Political Science in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas. His research employs time series analysis methods and machine learning in a variety of areas. The main time series models employed in this research involve Bayesian statistics, multiple equation or vector autoregression models, methods for producing and evaluating the quality of forecasts, the derivation of new models for time series of counts, and modeling structural change and endogenous shifts in data over time.
Skyler Cranmer is the Carter Phillips and Sue Henry Professor of Political Science at the Ohio State University and Director of the Network Independence in Social Systems (NISS) laboratory. Cranmer develops and applies statistical methods in the areas of network analysis, machine learning, and computational linguistics. He has been an Alexander von Humboldt fellow, a Visiting Professor at the University of Bern, and a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. He has written more than 45 articles, 6 software packages, and a book. Cranmer is also an entrepreneur. He co-developed the foundational patented technology for Cerenetics, co-founded the company, and serves as its President and CEO. He is also an experienced consultant, having worked with companies such as RTI, the USAF Research Lab, and Raytheon on defense-related data science projects. Cranmer received his B.A. (2002) and first M.A. (2003) from San Francisco State University, and his second M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis (2007). He was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University (2007-2008) and a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2008-2014). In 2014, he left UNC to take up the Carter Phillips and Sue Henry Professorship at the Ohio State University. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and other centers, institutes, and foundations.