Kelechi Amakoh

Kelechi Amakoh is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University with a specialization in comparative politics and research methods. At MSU, Kelechi’s research focuses on comparative political behavior and the role of communication, social identifiers and networks. 

Flávia Batista 

Flávia Batista is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research focuses on comparative political behavior in Latin America, particularly on polarization, misinformation, and democratic backsliding. She is interested in applying computational and experimental methods to study individuals’ attitudes towards democracy and has recently extended her focus to the study of impeachment. At UMD, Flávia is a member of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Computational Social Science (iLCSS) and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center (LASC). She also earned an M.A. in Government and Politics at UMD as part of her Ph.D. program. Prior to her doctoral journey at UMD, Flávia earned an M.A. in Brazilian Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Brasília (UnB). 

Uyen Diep 

Uyen Diep is a Ph.D. student in the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University pursuing a Doctor of Philosophy in Media & Public Affairs. With almost 10 years of experience as a Saigon-based reporter and foreign correspondent in Singapore, Malaysia, and the US, Uyen’s research agendas focus on Journalism, Media Literacy, and Social Media. 

Dayeon Eom 

Dayeon Eom is a Ph.D. student in the department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests involve public health and science communication, specifically regarding how to better communicate with marginalized communities. In addition, Dayeon has worked for various media publications including Investigate Midwest, The Nevada Independent and The Indianapolis Star. 

Catalina Farías 

Catalina Farías is a Ph.D. student in Media, Technology, and Society at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on how marginalized and racialized communities access, use, and (re)appropriate technologies. Specifically, she is interested in understanding why these communities use media technologies and go online, exploring their perceptions of these technologies, examining the dynamics of their interactions with technology, and investigating their involvement (or lack thereof) in the online environment. 

Matias Faure 

Matias Faure is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Politics at New York University (NYU). At NYU, Matias’ research focuses on Media Effects, Outside Lobbying, & Political Methods. 

Andreas Kupfer 

Andreas Kupfer is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute for Political Science of the Technical University of Darmstadt, working at the intersection of Data Science and Political Science. His work is centered around analyzing multimodal political communication, encompassing various channels such as parliamentary speeches, political advertisements, and social media. 

Alesha Lewis 

Alesha Lewis is a Political Science Ph.D. student from the University of Illinois student studying American Politics, Political Psychology, Racial & Ethnic Politics. Using a combination of both quantitative and qualitative methods, her work focuses on the effects of Black racial trauma on political behavior for marginalized communities. 

Mingyang Liu

Mingyang Liu is an Accounting Ph.D. candidate at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management. He holds a Bachelor of Commerce and a Master of Marketing Communications from the University of Melbourne.  His research centers on the political economy of accounting, exploring how the socio-political environment affects firms’ information dissemination. 

Dihan Shi

Dihan Shi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. Using spatial statistics, survey experiments, and computer vision, Dihan’s work focuses on comparative political economy and public opinion as well as causal inference problems in survey experimentation. Prior to joining Washington University, he was a Research Data Analyst at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions (2023). Dihan’s research on individual corruption perceptions and public support for free trade is forthcoming in International Studies Quarterly. 

Haoyu Shi

Haoyu Shi is a senior data analyst at NORC’s Social Data Collaboratory, utilizing machine learning methods to derive evidence-based insights from social media. Haoyu’s research is focused on implementing video research methods on YouTube and TikTok. 

Tyler Simko

Tyler Simko is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard University, and a founding member of the Algorithm-Assisted Redistricting Methodology (ALARM) Project. Tyler’s research focuses on measuring and improving equity in American state & local policymaking. Along with Soubhik Barari, he is the co-creator of LocalView — the largest existing database of local government meetings in the United States. Tyler regularly partners with federal, state, & local policymakers to improve program design & reduce administrative burdens. Tyler will spend 2024-2025 as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University, before starting as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. 

Shu-An Tsai

Shu-An Tsai is Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at SUNY at Buffalo. Earning several publications, Shu-An’s research focuses on Ethnic Politics, Voting Behavior, Political Participation. 

Ozlem Tuncel

Ozlem Tuncel (Ph.D.) is a Lecturer and Research Data Services Specialist at the RDS Department at Georgia State University. At GSU, Ozlem’s current research focuses on political parties, opposition cooperation and coordination, & authoritarian regimes. Her research has been published in several journals including the Party Politics, Journal of Peace Research, and Journal of Civil Society. 

Yiqiang Wang

Yiqiang Wang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics & Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong. Yiqiang’s academic work focuses on Comparative Politics, Political Communication, & Political Methodology. 

Tianhong Yin

Tianhong Yin is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. At the University of Illinois, Tianhong’s research focuses on International Relations & Political Communication. 

Jun Zhang

Jun Zhang is a Ph.D. student in the Social Science Program at Syracuse University. Jun has interdisciplinary interests and adopts diverse approaches, with her recent research focusing on the media image of nonprofit organizations and public figures’ speeches in authoritarian regimes. 

Tianlang Zhao

Tianlang Zhao is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. Tianlang is currently interested in comparative politics and computational social science, focusing on investigating the how state changes women and how women make states from the perspective of political communication. 

Mafalda Patacão Zúquete 

Mafalda Patacão Zúquete is a Ph.D candidate at the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin. Mafalda is a Data Scientist with an interest in Social Sciences, Political Science in particular. Her background includes a BSc in Applied Mathematics and an MSc in Data Science and Advanced Analytics, and she has experience in research, teaching, and industry work. 

Jing Luo

Jing Luo is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at The Ohio State University. Her research uses text analysis, network analysis and machine learning methods to analyze speeches, transcripts and other media data. Her projects span the substantive fields of international security, political economy, and special interests politics. 

Ifeoluwa Awopetu

Ifeoluwa Awopetu is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Linguistics at the University of Memphis. Her research draws on approaches that attend to everyday language use and multiple forms of expression, including texts, images, and other multimodal resources, to explore how identity and ideology shape communication, as well as how understanding and misunderstanding emerge across different contexts and communities. Her work explores how these insights can inform more effective and inclusive approaches to teaching, learning, and communication practices. 

Emma Bibina

Emma Bibina is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Georgia, specializing in American Politics and Political Methodology. Her substantive research lies at the intersection of political behavior and Congress, focusing on congressional representation and constituency responsiveness in the United States. Her dissertation examines whether local, district-specific, nonpartisan factors influence voter evaluations of their representatives amid growing political polarization and increasingly nationalized elections. 

Yun Choi

Yun Choi is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, also pursuing the Graduate Certificate in Statistics and Machine Learning. Yun’s research develops computational and experimental methods for the systematic analysis of visual political communication, combining computer vision and causal inference to measure the presence and effects of visual political content. Yun is also the Data-Driven Social Science Fellow and Quantitative and Analytical Political Science Fellow at the University. 

Thu Dang

Thu “Panda” Dang is a Ph.D. student in Communication at the University of Florida. Her research focuses on communication disparities affecting minority and immigrant communities, exploring how communication shapes belonging, credibility, and voice across different cultural contexts. She is especially interested in perspectives from Southeast Asia and other underrepresented communities. Before pursuing her academic career, Thu worked in public relations and broadcast journalism, holding roles at communication agencies and government organizations. Working closely with raw footage from press conferences and public affairs programming shaped her approach to communication, emphasizing how meaning develops in real time through tone, gesture, and interaction beyond scripted messages.

Briana Garcia

Briana Garcia is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan and serves as a Board Representative for the Rackham Student Government. Her research in American politics focuses on psychological, behavioral, and identity-based dynamics, with particular attention to how racial and religious identities shape public opinion and political behavior. She is an active member of the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Comparative Politics (IWCP) and the American Contention Working Group (AWG). Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, Briana earned a B.S. in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland, where she was affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Computational Social Science (iLCSS). She also holds an A.A. in Arts and Sciences from the College of Southern Maryland.

Saliha Garcia

Saliha Garcia is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, College Station studying American Politics, Racial & Ethnic Politics, and Research Methods. Her research broadly examines immigration attitudes and the factors that shape them, including blame attribution, responsibility, and country-of-origin. She is interested in how immigration-related policies influence public opinion and political representation over time.

Shuning Ge 

Shuning Ge is a Ph.D. candidate studying Political Science and Statistics (the joint Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Statistics at IDSS). She is broadly interested in machine learning, multimodal data, and causal inference. Her substantive interests include migration and immigration, political economy of the development, with a regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. Before joining MIT, Shuning worked as a Senior Data Coordinator at Penn Development Research Initiative, research assistant at MIT CSAIL, and was a co-founder of a start-up with $10 million Series A funding. She graduated with a B.S. in Material Science & Engineering and a B.A. in Management from Tsinghua University. She also holds an M.S. in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and is a recipient of the Kenan Sahin Presidential Fellowship at MIT.  

Jingying Hu

Jingying Hu is a PhD student in Linguistics at Purdue University. Her research examines how humans and AI understand and use language through experimental and computational approaches. Her work includes bilingual sentence processing, educational natural language processing, and multimodal language analysis. 

Soyeon Jeon

Soyeon Jeon is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis, where she also holds an A.M. in Statistics and Data Science. Her research sits at the intersection of political behavior, computational methodology, and deliberative democracy, with a particular focus on how citizens reason about democratic institutions and what conditions allow that reasoning to withstand partisan pressure. Her broader methodological work centers on bias in vision language models, cross lingual transfer for political text analysis, and LLM assisted measurement in the social sciences. You can find her CV here. 

Hyerin Kwon

Hyerin Kwon (M.A., University of New Mexico) is a Ph.D. student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research focuses on political communication using computational methods. She is particularly interested in exploring online information dynamics, with a focus on how political figures and news media construct and deliver targeted and strategic messages, and how the public responds to and engages with these messages. In addition, she examines how politically relevant external events shape information flows. She employs multimodal computational approaches and time-series analysis to study the dynamics of political narratives in digital environments. 

Bitsikokos Loizos

Loizos is a PhD student and a CLA Dean’s Fellow at the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University, affiliated with the Media, Technology, and Society group. He holds degrees (BSc, MSc) in physics and applied mathematics from the National Technical University of Athens (N.T.U.A.) and an MA in computational social science from the University of Chicago, focusing on sociology. Loizos’ research lies at the intersection of computational social science, digital humanities, platform and critical AI studies, with a particular interest in the intricate relationship between algorithms and societal transformation. Methodologically he specializes in computational text analysis (embeddings, topic modelling, sentiment analysis, …), as well as network analysis and simulation. The Onassis Foundation Scholarship program supports his PhD work. 

Raymundo Lopez

Raymundo Lopez is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University. His academic training lies at the intersection of American polities and research methods, using survey experiments and congressional speeches to investigate how individuals interpret and respond to elite political messaging. 

Larissa Migotto

Larissa Migotto is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, specializing in comparative politics and political behavior. Her research examines how national polarization influences local elections in Brazil, focusing on why municipal candidates use national political figures as campaign cues and how voters respond to them. Methodologically, she combines experiments, elite interviews, computational text analysis, and visual data from televised debates and social media. 

Eunseong Oh

Eunseong Oh is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. She studies American political institutions, with a particular emphasis on the U.S. Congress, partisan polarization, and elite political communication. Her research integrates machine learning and deep neural networks to address methodological challenges in measurement and to advance the analysis of multimodal political data.

Lucas Ophoff

Lucas Ophoff is a Ph.D. candidate in the Politics Department at Princeton University.
His research investigates online media diets and public opinion, with a particular emphasis on generative Al and short-form video platforms in political communication.

Isaac Opoku-Agyemang

Isaac is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Missouri. His research focuses on peacekeeping, post-conflict recovery, human rights, and the role of international organizations in preventing conflict, especially in Africa. He is especially interested in how different peacekeeping designs affect long-term stability, including refugee return, electoral integrity, and human rights protection. His background in communication also shapes how he think about these issues. He cares not only about whether peacekeeping works, but also about how peacekeeping and human rights are framed, debated, and defended in public and diplomatic settings. He is interested in peacekeeping conditions. in the way human rights violations are named and discussed, and in whether naming and shaming can shape international responses and outcomes on the ground. At the Video Research Institute, he hopes to build stronger skills in video-based research and improve my Rand Python workflow for working with C-SPAN archives. He wants to use these tools to study how diplomats talk about peacekeeping, legitimacy, and human rights, and whether those debates have real effects on conflict and recovery.

Hanif Sajid

Hanif Sajid is a postdoctoral research fellow in Computational Social Science at Catawba College’s Center for North Carolina Politics and Public Service. He is a former Fulbright Scholar and earned his Ph.D. in public policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His academic work builds on a strong foundation in political science, holding both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Government College University in Lahore, Pakistan. As a computational social scientist, he specializes in both advanced statistical methods and text analysis, leveraging natural language processing via both traditional machine learning techniques and transformer-based large language models (LLMs). 

Jack Stewart

Jack is a a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the University of California San Diego, specializing in American politics and political theory. His research now centers on elections and voting, and he is currently writing about migration and the incumbency advantage in U.S. House elections. He has previously written on ranked-choice voting and electoral politics in Australia. Beyond this, he is currently a research assistant at UCSD’s Center for Transparent and Trusted Elections. Before UCSD, he completed his BPhil in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and received First Class Honours in Political Science and International Relations at the University of Western Australia. 

Jing Ling Tan

Jing Ling is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Government at Harvard University. His research examines the linkages between international politics and domestic environmental politics/policies. This includes how the international political economy, institutions, and global norms influence political behaviour on climate change and vice versa. At Harvard, he is a graduate affiliate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Centre for International Development.   

Zerui Tian

Zerui is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at University of Oxford. His doctoral thesis focuses on life course research and family demography using quantitative and computational methods. Prior to Oxford, he earned a BA in Economics-Mathematics from Columbia University and an MA in Education Policy from Stanford University.  

Christina Walker

Christina Walker is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Purdue University and affiliated with the Governance and Responsible AI Lab (GRAIL) and the Computational Social Science Lab. In Fall 2026, she will join the University of Georgia’s Department of International Affairs as an Assistant Professor. She specializes in comparative politics and methodology, with a research agenda focused on how digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) shape political information, public trust, and democratic accountability. She examines both how these technologies affect political behavior and develops new computational and experimental methods to study these effects. On the substantive side, she examines elite strategic communication and information in digital environments, and how citizens process and respond to political content online. On the methodological side, she develops computational and experimental tools that advance how political scientists study behavior in the digital era.  

William Zelin

William Zelin is a PhD student at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research draws on psychological principles to study political communication and political behavior within the context of international relations. He is interested in applying computational and experimental methods to analyze the effects of visual media on public attitudes, opinions and behaviors regarding intergroup relations, prejudice, conflict, and peace. He has also earned a B.A. in Political Science and Statistics from the University of Florida.

Jasper Neath

Jasper Neath is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at Purdue University. His research focuses on American political behavior, environmental justice, and judicial politics. His research integrates a variety of methodological techniques including spatial analysis, longitudinal analysis, machine learning, and causal inference methods to understand how Americans react to politically salient objects. 

Viktoria Zlomanova

Viktoria Zlomanova is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at Duke University who focuses on comparative politics and research methods (particularly NLP and various statistical methods). Viktoria is interested in legislatures, responsiveness, and/or strategic party competition, especially in Southeast Asia.