2022

`List of Guest Speakers at the Data Analytics Colloquium (2022)`

Christopher 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

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.

Matthew Lebo

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.

Jim Granato

Jim Granato, Dean, Hobby School of Public Affairs, 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.

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.

Skyler Cranmer

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.

Patrick Brandt

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.

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.