People

PEOPLE

The Center for Social Media and Politics is comprised of a diverse network of faculty, staff, postdocs, and students. Although we come from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds, our work is tied together by our interest in the intersection of social media and politics.

For press and media inquiries, reach out to Zeve Sanderson at zeve.sanderson@nyu.edu. For all other inquiries, write to csmap@nyu.edu.

Richard Bonneau

bonneau@nyu.edu
Personal Site
Google Scholar
Biology, Computer Science, and Data Science

Dr. Bonneau focuses on three main areas of data science: 1) systems biology, e.g. learning biological networks from genomics data, 2) designing and predicting protein and protein-mimetic molecular structure, and 3) computational social science with a focus on social network enabled science. In the area of genomics and systems biology he has played key roles in achieving critical field-wide milestones. In the area of structure prediction he was an initial author on the state-of-the art Rosetta code, which was the first code to demonstrate accurate and comprehensive ability to predict protein structure in the absence of sequence homology. Dr. Bonneau is a co-director of the SMaPP lab at NYU. His expertise in data science, leading large-scale systems biology consortia motivates many contributions to SMaPP lab. His experience with lab-based science, industry collaboration, and network science are key to SMaPP lab’s innovative construction. Dr. Bonneau was selected by Discover magazine as one of the top 20 scientific minds under 40 and a recent review in the top biology journal, Cell, lists Dr. Bonneau’s 2007 paper on the prediction of global dynamic regulatory networks as a landmark paper in field of Systems Biology. Dr. Bonneau is a founding member of the Flatiron institute, a new large scale effort to create an intramural data science center at the Simons Foundation. Dr. Bonneau is a PI on the initial Moore-Sloan data science environments grant and part of the group of faculty at NYU that created the new Center for Data Science at NYU.

Jonathan Nagler
jonathan.nagler@nyu.edu
Personal Site
Google Scholar
Politics and Data Science

Jonathan Nagler is Professor of Politics and affiliated faculty at the Center of Data Science at New York University. He is a co-Director of the NYU Social Media and Political Participation Laboratory. Nagler is a past president of the Society for Political Methodology, as well as an Inaugural Fellow of the Society for Political Methodology. Professor Nagler’s research focuses on voting and elections, and the role of social media, as well as traditional media, in politics. He has been at the forefront of computational social science for many years, and pioneered innovative methods for analysis of discrete choice problems. Nagler has produced recent papers on the nature of online ideological media consumption of individuals, the amount of hate speech on Twitter, the impact of exposure to online information on knowledge of politics and political attitudes, and the impact of media coverage of the economy on economic perceptions. Several of these papers have combined survey data with social media consumption in novel ways. Nagler has been a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute, a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, and has taught at Harvard, Caltech, and the ICPSR and Essex Summer Programs in Political Methodology. He is a co-author of Who Votes Now? (Princeton University Press, 2014).

Joshua A. Tucker
joshua.tucker@nyu.edu
Personal Site
Google Scholar
Blog
Politics, Russian and Slavic Studies, and Data Science

Joshua A. Tucker is Professor of Politics, affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, and affiliated Professor of Data Science at New York University. He is the Director of NYU’s Jordan Center for Advanced Study of Russia, a co-Director of the NYU Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) laboratory, and a co-author/editor of the award-winning politics and policy blog The Monkey Cage at The Washington Post. He serves on the advisory board of the American National Election Study, the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, and numerous academic journals, and was the co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Experimental Political Science. His original research was on mass political behavior in post-communist countries, including voting and elections, partisanship, public opinion formation, and protest participation. In 2006, he was awarded the Emerging Scholar Award for the top scholar in the field of Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior within 10 years of the doctorate. More recently, he has been at the forefront of the newly emerging field of study of the relationship between social media and politics. His research in this area has included studies on the effects of network diversity on tolerance, partisan echo chambers, online hate speech, the effects of exposure to social media on political knowledge, online networks and protest, disinformation and fake news, how authoritarian regimes respond to online opposition, and Russian bots and trolls. Tucker has been a visiting Professor at the Fundacion Juan March in Madrid, Spain, and Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome, Italy. His research has appeared in over two-dozen scholarly journals, and his most recent book is the co-authored Communism’s Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes (Princeton University Press, 2017).

Pablo Barberá
pablo.barbera@nyu.edu
Personal Site

Pablo Barberá is an Assistant Professor at the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California. He received his PhD in Political Science from New York University in 2015. His primary areas of research include social media and politics, quantitative methods, and electoral behavior and political representation. For more information and recent publications, check his website: www.pablobarbera.com

Pat Egan
patrick.egan@nyu.edu
Personal Site
Google Scholar

Patrick J. Egan is a political scientist who studies the interaction of public opinion and institutions in American politics. He is an associate professor in NYU’s Wilf Family Department of Politics, with an associated faculty appointment at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service. His research on social media includes work that explores how social media affects political knowledge and how the parties’ “ownership” of issues is reflected in the topics that elected officials and rank-and-file partisans discuss on social media.

Cody Buntain
cbuntain@nyu.edu
Google Scholar
Personal Site

Cody Buntain is an assistant professor of Informatics at NJIT. His primary research areas exist at the intersection of data science in social media and the social sciences, specifically how individuals engage socially and politically and respond to crises and disaster in online spaces. Current problems he is studying include cross-platform information flows, temporal evolution/politicization of topics, misinformation, and information/interaction quality. Recent publications include papers on influencing credibility assessment in social media, consistencies in social media’s response to crises, and characterizing gender and directedness in online harassment.

Andy Guess
aguess@princeton.edu
Personal Site
Google Scholar

Andy Guess (SMaPP postdoc 2015-2017) is an assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University. His research interests lie at the intersection of political communication, public opinion, and political behavior. Recent projects in collaboration with the SMaPP Lab investigate patterns in the spread of online misinformation and the accuracy of survey questions about social media and politics.

Jennifer Larson
larson.jenn@gmail.com
Personal Site
Google Scholar

Jenn Larson is an associate professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. She received her B.A. in mathematics and political science from Creighton University, and her Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University. Her research explores how and why social networks affect political behavior in order to explain outcomes such as protests, civil conflict, and informal governance. She is currently the Vice President of the Political Networks Section of the American Political Science Association.

Kevin Munger
kevinmunger@gmail.com
Personal Site
Google Scholar

Kevin is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Princeton Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, and will begin as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Penn State University in the fall of 2019.

Julia Payson
julia.payson@gmail.com
Personal Site
Google Scholar

Julia is an Assistant Professor in the NYU Department of Politics. She studies representation, accountability, and public service provision in state and local governments in the U.S. Her book project explores why some local governments hire lobbyists to represent them at the state and federal level and examines the financial implications of intergovernmental lobbying on municipal inequality. This research has received support from the National Science Foundation and the Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences.

Sergey Sanovich
sanovich@princeton.edu
Personal Site
Google Scholar

Sergey Sanovich is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University. Previously, he was a Cyber Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University, where he co-authored “Securing American Elections” report, particularly focusing on the protection from disinformation. Sergey received his Ph.D. in political science from NYU. His research is focused on online censorship and propaganda by authoritarian regimes; social media platform governance; elections and partisanship in electoral autocracies; and personalization of politics in both autocratic and democratic countries.

Alexandra Siegel
aasiegel@gmail.com
Personal Site
Google Scholar

Alexandra Siegel is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford’s Immigration Policy Lab and a Research Associate at SMaPP. Her research uses social media data, social network analysis, and textual analysis to explore mass and elite political behavior in the Arab World. She received her PhD from NYU’s Department of Politics in 2018. Previously, Alexandra was a Junior Fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a CASA Fellow at the American University in Cairo. She holds a Bachelors in International Relations and Arabic from Tufts University.

Cristian Vaccari
c.vaccari@lboro.ac.uk
Personal Site
Google Scholar

Cristian Vaccari (PhD, IULM University in Milan, 2006) is Reader in Political Communication at Loughborough University. He studies political communication by elites and citizens in comparative perspective using a variety of methods. From January 2019 he will serve as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Press/Politics. He is the author of Digital Politics in Western Democracies: A Comparative Study (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). His personal website can be found at www.cristianvaccari.com. He tweets as @25lettori.

Denis Stukal
denis.stukal@gmail.com
Personal Site

Denis Stukal is a postdoctoral researcher with SMaPP. He is doing research in the fields of Comparative Politics and Political Methodology. His primary focus is the use of machine learning techniques to study political misinformation in post-communist countries (especially, in Russia).

Kevin Aslett
kma412@nyu.edu
Personal Site

Kevin is a Political Science Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Washington. His fields of study are comparative politics, political economy, and methodology. Prior to graduate school, he conducted research at the National Bank of Poland (NBP) in Warsaw on the consequences of the shock therapy economic transition in Poland. His current research focuses on the effect of social media on political behavior (namely, social mobilization) and political economic development in emerging economies. He is also very interested in new methods in political science research, specifically the collection and analysis of large data sets. His dissertation focuses on the effect of transportation infrastructure on private firm innovation and support for populist policies in emerging economies. His research has been generously supported by the EU Center at the UW, Council for European Studies, U.S. Department of Education, and UW Polish Studies Endowment.

Zhanna Terechshenko
zt10@nyu.edu
Personal Site

Zhanna is a PhD Candidate in Political Science and Social Data Analytics at the Pennsylvania State University. She studies international conflicts escalation, foreign policy, human rights, and she is interested in machine learning methods and text analysis with application to political and social information. Her dissertation looks at the effect of hawkishness of political leaders on conflict escalation.

Megan Brown
meganbrown@nyu.edu

Megan Brown is a research engineer and data scientist at SMaPP. She is especially interested in studying cross-platform media manipulation, understanding bias in machine learning and AI, and the effect of computational information recommendation systems on political information and behavior.

Sean Kates
sk5350@nyu.edu

Sean is a Ph.D. student at the Wilf Family Department of Politics, New York University. His studies focus on political behavior and party politics, particularly as they relate to far right parties in Europe. He holds bachelor’s degrees in History and Political Science from the University of Maryland, College Park and a Master of Public Administration degree from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Nicolas Kugel
nicolas.kugel@nyu.edu

Nicolas Kugel is a PhD student studying politics at New York University. His primary area of inquiry is the development and impact of far-right discourse on and offline, as well as its effect on immigration policy.

Angela Lai
angela.lai@nyu.edu

Angela is a PhD student in the Center for Data Science at NYU. Her research interests include natural language processing, network analysis, and political and social behavior and its interaction with social media.

Evgenii Nikitin
e.nikitin@nyu.edu

Evgenii Nikitin is a PhD student in the Department of Politics at NYU. His research is focused on developing novel methods for analysis of social media data. His specific research interests include content-based estimation of ideological positions, target-dependent sentiment analysis, and measuring effects of social pressure on online political behavior.

Vishakh Padmakumar
vp1271@nyu.edu
Personal Site
Github

Vishakh Padmakumar is an MS-CS student at Courant in NYU. His area of interest is using machine learning and NLP to model and retrieve useful information from unstructured text data.

Ye Wang
yw1576@nyu.edu

Ye is a Ph.D. student at the Wilf Family Department of Politics, New York University. He studies political methodology and public opinion in non-democratic countries, with a special focus on China. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Math from Fudan University and a master degree in Economics from Peking University.

Jan Zilinsky
zilinsky@nyu.edu

Jan Zilinsky is a PhD student in the Department of Politics at NYU. His research focuses on media consumption, learning, and political behavior.

Fengyuan Liu
fl1092@nyu.edu

Fengyuan Liu is currently an undergraduate student studying computer science and politics at NYU Abu Dhabi. He is interested in studying how internet technologies may facilitate democratization process, and how dissidents in China utilize social media platforms to make their voices heard.

Nick Beauchamp
n.beauchamp@northeastern.edu
Personal Site

Nick Beauchamp is an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University in the Department of Political Science, and a core faculty member of the NULab for Texts, Maps and Networks and the Network Science Institute. His research examines how political opinions form and change as a result of discussion, deliberation and argument in domains such as legislatures, campaigns, the judiciary, and social media, using techniques from machine learning, automated text analysis, and social network analysis. Recent projects using social media explore deliberative quality in online political forums, and predict elections using Twitter textual data (paper forthcoming in the AJPS). Current projects include visualizing the rhetorical structures of political speeches, experimental designs for optimizing political advertisements, and the prediction of judicial opinions and ideologies.

Adam Berinsky
berinsky@mit.edu
Personal Site

Adam Berinsky is a Professor of Political Science at MIT and serves as the director of the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab (PERL). Berinsky received his PhD. from the University of Michigan in 2000. He is the author of In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq (University of Chicago Press, 2009). He is also the author of Silent Voices: Public Opinion and Political Participation in America (Princeton University Press, 2004) and has published articles in The American Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, Political Psychology, Public Opinion Quarterly, The Quarterly Journal of Political Science, American Politics Research, and Communist and Post-Communist Studies. He is the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Sandra González-Bailón
sgonzalez bailon@asc.upenn.edu
Personal Site

Sandra González-Bailón is an Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and affiliated faculty at the Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining Penn, she was a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (2008-2013), where she is now a Research Associate. She completed her doctoral degree in Nuffield College (University of Oxford) and her undergraduate studies at the University of Barcelona. Sandra’s research lies at the intersection of network science, data mining, computational tools, and political communication. She is currently working on the book Decoding the Social World. When Data Science meets Communication (forthcoming with MIT Press) and co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Communication in the Networked Age (with Brooke Foucault-Welles, forthcoming with Oxford University Press). More information about her research and publications can be found at her group’s website .

John Jost
john.jost@nyu.edu
Personal Site
Google Scholar

John T. Jost is Professor of Psychology and Politics and Co-Director of the Center for Social and Political Behavior at New York University. His research, which addresses stereotyping, prejudice, political ideology, and system justification theory, has been funded by the National Science Foundation and has appeared in top scientific journals and received national and international media attention. He has published over 150 journal articles and book chapters and four co-edited book volumes, including Social and Psychological Bases of Ideology and System Justification (Oxford, 2009). He has received numerous honors and awards, including the Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize, Erik Erikson Award for Early Career Research Achievement in Political Psychology, International Society for Self and Identity Early Career Award, Society for Personality and Social Psychology Theoretical Innovation Prize, Society of Experimental Social Psychology Career Trajectory Award, and the Morton Deutsch Award for Distinguished Scholarly and Practical Contributions to Social Justice. He has served on several editorial boards and executive committees of professional societies and is currently editor of the Oxford University Press book series on Political Psychology. He is a Fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology and the Association of Psychological Science.

Marko Klasnja
marko.klasnja@gmail.com

Marko Klasnja is a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. His research mainly centers on the political economy of accountability in developing democracies. To examine the factors that hinder or promote the electoral sanctioning of corrupt politicians, Marko uses a variety approaches, including game-theoretic models, survey and natural experiments, and the analysis of large datasets (e.g. politicians’ wealth declarations and a large volume of public procurement contracts to measure corruption more precisely). He is also interested in the issues of political representativeness of social media data.

Molly Roberts
molly.e.roberts@gmail.com
Personal Site

Margaret Roberts is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. Her 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 in China. With respect to social media, her work has focused on reverse-engineering Internet censorship in China, estimating the effects of censorship, and developing new algorithms to analyze large amounts of text. Her research has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Political Analysis, and Science.

Yannis Theocharis
yannis.theocharis@uni-bremen.de
Personal Site

Yannis Theocharis is Professor of Media and Communication at ZeMKI, Centre for Media, Communication and Information Sciences. He was previously Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow and Research Fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) and Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen. He holds a PhD in Political Science from UCL (2011) and his research interests are in political behaviour, political communication and computational social science. His work focuses on the effects of digital media on political participation and uncivil communication using longitudinal, experimental and digital trace data.

William Brady
Personal Site
bradywilliamj@gmail.com

Billy is a NSF postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychology at Yale University.

Melanie Langer
msl409@nyu.edu

Melanie Langer received a B.S. in Psychology with a focus on Philosophy from Yale University and an M.A. in French Cultural Studies from Columbia University. She is currently a doctoral student in Social Psychology at New York University. She is interested in values, beliefs, and preferences, how ideology motivates positions on particular issues and behaviors, and the mechanisms by which people’s attachment and resistance to certain attitudes and behaviors are altered.

Megan Metzger
megan.metzger@nyu.edu

Megan Metzger’s research interests include social movements, political violence, public protest, revolution and nationalist politics. Her previous work has focused on Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and she has spent time in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Bosnia, as well as in Spain. Megan holds a Bachelors in Anthropology and International Studies from Macalester College, a Masters in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a PhD from New York University.

Joanna Sterling
joanna.sterling@nyu.edu
Personal Site

Joanna Sterling received her BA at the University of Pittsburgh in both Psychology and International and Area Studies. She is recieved a doctorate in Social Psychology at New York University. Joanna is interested in studying conceptions of ideology, ideological identification, and inter-party communication. Her other research interests include system justification theory, mass media communication, leader perception, and indirect means of communication.

Niklas Loynes
nl1676@nyu.edu

Nik is a PhD candidate in Political Science and Data Science at the University of Manchester, and a visiting Research Fellow/Assistant Research Scientist at SMaPP. His research interests focus on the extraction of individual-level public opinion from social media data as well as the development of computational methods for estimating latent socio-demographic characteristics of social media users. In the past, Nik has worked as a researcher in Social Policy and Health Economics at The University of Manchester’s Personal Social Services Research Unit. He holds a Master’s degree in Public Policy from the University in Manchester and a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Psychology from the University of Mannheim.

Stiene Praet
Stiene.Praet@uantwerpen.be

Stiene Praet is a PhD candidate at the Applied Data Mining research group at the university of Antwerp (Belgium), and a visiting Research Fellow at SMaPP. Her research focuses on the application of data mining, text mining and network analysis techniques to study social media, voter behavior and political communication on a fine-grained level.

Natasha Gordon
natasha.gordon@nyu.edu

Natasha Gordon is a Program Administrator for The Center for Social Media and Politics. She is also a Master’s student in Political Science at NYU researching democratization and sociotechnical development, specifically focused on technology policy and technological capacity-building in sub-Saharan African states. Prior to joining the center, Natasha facilitated international programs and student consulting projects at the NYU Stern School of Business.

Zeve Sanderson
zeve.sanderson@nyu.edu

Zeve is the Executive Director of the Center for Social Media and Politics. He has held roles across finance and operations for a number of for- and non-profit organizations. His research interests include misinformation and radicalization, and he is currently working on a project related to fact-checking.

Faculty Directors