Margaret E. Roberts

Margaret (Molly) E. Roberts is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at the University of California, San Diego. There, she co-directs the China Data Lab at the 21st Century China Center, while also being a part of the Omni-Methods Group. Roberts received a PhD from Harvard in Government (2014), MS from Stanford in Statistics (2009) and BA from Stanford in International Relations and Economics (2009).

Roberts’s research interests lie in the intersection of political methodology and the politics of information, with a specific focus on methods of automated content analysis and the politics of censorship and propaganda in China. Much of her research uses social media, online experiments, and large collections of texts to understand the influence of censorship and propaganda on access to information and beliefs about politics.