Upcoming guests for 2023

List of Guest Speakers at the Data Analytics Colloquium (2023)

YiQing Xu

YiQing Xu is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. His primary research covers political methodology, Chinese politics, and their intersection. He received a PhD in Poltical Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016. His work has appeared in American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and Political Analysis, among other peer-reviewed journals. He has won several professional awards, including the best article award from the American Journal of Political Science in 2016 and the Miller Prize (2018, 2020) for the best work appearing in Political Analysis the preceding year.

Connor Jerzak

Connor Jerzak received a Master’s in Statistics and Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University, where he was advised by Kosuke Imai, Gary King, and Xiang Zhou. During graduate school, he also worked as an intern at Adobe Research in San Jose, California with Nikos Vlassis. In 2021-2022, Connor did a one-year postdoc with Adel Daoud and the AI and Global Development Lab at Linköping University in Sweden while serving as a Visiting Scholar in the Program on Governance and Local Development (GLD) at the University of Gothenburg. Since 2022, he has served at the University of Texas at Austin as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in peer-reviewed machine learning, economics, and political science venues. During spring of 2024, Connor will be teaching at Harvard University.

Arthur Spirling

Arthur Spirling is the Class of 1987 Professor of Politics. He received a bachelor's and master's degree from the London School of Economics, and a master's degree and PhD from the University of Rochester. Previously, he served on the faculties of Harvard University and New York University. Spirling's research centers on quantitative methods for analyzing political behavior, especially institutional development and the use of text-as-data. His work on these subjects has appeared in outlets such as the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science and the Journal of the American Statistical Association. Currently he is active on problems at the intersection of data science and social science, including those related to machine learning, and large language models. He previously won teaching and mentoring awards at Harvard University and NYU, along with the "Emerging Scholar" prize from the Society for Political Methodology.

Justin E. Esarey

Dr. Justin Esarey is an Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest University. He received his PhD in Political Science from Florida State University in 2008 following a BA in Political Science and BS in Economics from Bowling Green State University in 2002. His area of specialization is political methodology, especially hypothesis testing and the scientific ecosystem. His current substantive projects study the relationship between corruption and women's participation in government. Dr. Esarey is currently co-editor of PS: Political Science and Politics and the Principal Investigator of the International Methods Colloquium project.

Rebecca Cordell

Dr. Cordell is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas. Prior to that, she was a post-doc in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. Dr. Cordell completed her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Department of Government at the University of Essex in 2017. Dr. Cordell studies the causes, dynamics and consequences of state repression, human rights and political violence using computational methods and quantitative text analysis. Her research has been published in International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, International Interactions, and Journal of Human Rights. Dr. Cordell has shared insights from this work with the public in articles for The Monkey Cage, Political Violence @ A Glance, and The Conversation. In 2018, Dr. Cordell received the ISA Human Rights Section's Steven C. Poe Best Graduate Student Paper Award.

Ryan Kennedy

Ryan Kennedy (Ph.D., The Ohio State University, 2008) is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Houston (UH), principal investigator for the NSF-funded Community Responsive Algorithms for Social Accountability (CRASA) project, director of the Machine-Assisted Human Decision-making (MAHD) Lab (UH), founding associate director of analytics for the Initiative for Sustainable Energy Policy, editor of Research & Politics, and a research associate at the Hobby Center for Public Policy.