Introducing the latest in Data Science,

focusing on applications in social,

political and policy sciences.

List of Guest Speakers at the Data Analytics Colloquium (2020)

 

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.
 

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.
 

Larry Bartels

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.
 

Michael Lewis-Beck

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

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.
 

Kosuke Imai

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).
 

Thomas Scotto

Professor Thomas Scotto is Dean of Learning and Teaching in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow. As a Professor of Political Science, he publishes widely on the area of comparative public opinion, latent variable modelling, and foreign policy analysis. His recent articles appear in Personality and Individual Differences, the Australian Journal of International Affairs.
 

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.
 

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.

 

Jeff Gill

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.