SICSS-Rutgers

Katherine McCabe

Katie is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. Her research interests include public opinion, social identity, and political psychology.

Hana Shepherd

Hana is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on social networks, social norms, and group cultures.

Kira Sanbonmatsu

Kira is Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University and Senior Scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics. Her research interests include gender, race/ethnicity, parties, public opinion, and state politics.

Thomas Davidson

Thomas Davidson is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Cornell University. In fall 2020 he will be an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University. He studies political discussions, hate speech, and other topics using digital trace data.

Daniel Hopkins

Daniel Hopkins is Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Michael Kenwick

Michael Kenwick is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University.

Yanna Krupnikov

Yanna Krupnikov is Associate Professor of Political Science at Stony Brook University.

Arvind Narayanan

Arvind Narayanan is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Princeton.

Katherine Ognyanova

Katherine Ognyanova is an Assistant Professor at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University.

Adam Thal

Adam Thal is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University.

Simone Zhang

Simone Zhang is a PhD student in Sociology at Princeton University interested in social stratification, organizations, and how social policy is implemented on the ground.

Kathleen Rogers

Kathleen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University. Her research integrates work on symbolic representation from the field of women and politics with scholarship on emotions and social identities from political psychology.

Zainab Alam

Zainab Alam is a PhD candidate in political science at Rutgers University, focusing on women and politics and comparative politics. Her current research is on digitally-enabled political participation in the context of South Asia.

Analia Albuja

Analia is an incoming postdoctoral fellow in Psychology at Duke University. She completed her PhD at Rutgers University, where her work examined the discrimination experiences of people who hold multiple identities (e.g., biracial, bicultural identities), and how people who hold multiple (or otherwise stigmatized) identities are perceived by others. She will be extending this research to child populations in her postdoc position.

Chelsea Allen

Chelsea Allen is a doctoral student at Columbia University's School of Social Work. She currently works with Dr. Courtney Cogburn examining the role of racism and race-related stress in the production of health inequities. Additionally, this work studies the effect of immersive virtual reality experiences on psychological processes, such as empathy/social perspective taking, racial bias and decision making. Previous to attending Columbia, she practiced as a clinical therapist working with children and families. Chelsea's scholarship is interested in historical trauma and its specific application to African American communities. Her current research involves developing a conceptual model that reframes this theory through a multi-disciplinary lens that integrates various theories that are related, but not intentionally grounded, in a historical trauma framework.

Meril Antony

Meril Antony is a doctoral student in the School of Public Affairs and Administration, Rutgers University-Newark. Her idea of conducting research is to be at the nexus of civil society and academia that allows for an understanding of strengthening partnerships to enhance social impact. Her current research interests include understanding the effects of social class inequality and race on parental perception regarding school engagement, and how schools as institutions can have a positive social impact. Her dissertation intends to utilize social network analysis to identify co-production behavior between parents and schools. Meril has a Master of Public Administration (MPA) degree from Rutgers University and a Bachelor’s in Economics degree from Delhi University, India.

Carolyn Barnett

Carolyn Barnett is a PhD candidate in politics at Princeton. She is interested in combining experimental, computational, and qualitative methods to study how policy change affects social norms and behavior related to gender equality and political participation, with a regional focus on the Middle East and North Africa. Previously, Carolyn was a research fellow with the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. She holds an MSc in Middle East politics and an MA in Islamic studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and a BSFS from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

Ihsan Beezer

Ihsan Beezer is a PhD student in Organization Management at Rutgers Business School. He is also affiliated with Rutgers Business School’s Center for Urban Entrepreneurship and Economic Development (CUEED). His research focuses on urban and minority entrepreneurship. He holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Maryland, College Park and M.S. in Management from the Kenan-Flagler Business School of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Ashley Bieniek-Tobasco

Ashley Bieniek-Tobasco is a Research Assistant Professor at University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health in the Division of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences. Her research focuses on the theory, practice and evaluation of climate change and risk communication. In particular, she is interested in the interaction between narrative transportation, efficacy beliefs, emotion, and political affiliation in responses to climate change communication. She is also interested in characterizing the public health impacts of exposure to COVID-19 misinformation. Prior to joining UIC, she worked in climate science policy at the US Global Change Research Program. Ashley received her DrPH from George Washington University and is a two-time alumna of the University of Michigan.

Changyong Choi

Changyong Choi is a postdoctoral fellow with the Institute for Child and Family Well-Being (ICFW) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His research interests include adverse childhood experiences, psychosocial well-being of children and youths, health disparity in life course, and early childhood intervention. He is working on several projects with the ICFW including the FACT study and the Family Connect. His major research aims with the ICFW are to understand how adversities in childhood are embodied in multidimensional health outcomes and to identify what risk and protective factors influence on resilience among disadvantaged children. Prior to postdoctoral fellowship, Changyong earned his PhD degree in social welfare from Seoul National University in South Korea.

Amanda Cox

Amanda Barrett Cox is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Bryn Mawr College. Her research examines how organizations transform and reproduce social inequality. Her specific areas of interest include power, economic elites and philanthropy, education and social mobility, social networks, and emotions. She holds a PhD in sociology and education from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in Sociology of Education from Stanford University, an MSEd in Education, Culture, and Society from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in Classical Civilizations from Wellesley College. Before pursuing her PhD, she worked as a community organizer and a high-school Latin teacher.

Aysenur Deger Yanik

Aysenur is pursuing a PhD in Political Science at Maxwell School in Syracuse University. She studies comparative political behavior, political psychology, and women & gender. Currently, she researches social media use’s effect on political attitudes. She seeks to integrate social media and digital trace data to her studies.

Beidi Dong

Beidi Dong is an Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy at George Mason University. He received his PhD from the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law at the University of Florida and completed post-doctoral training in the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology and Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on identifying risk and protective factors of community violence (especially gun violence) in the United States, and developing and implementing evidence-based prevention, response, and recovery strategies that mitigate the negative impacts of violence on the affected individuals and communities. His research also addresses inequalities in access to health care, social services, and other resources that are critical to post-trauma resilience.

Kasey Eickmeyer

Kasey Eickmeyer is a postdoctoral researcher at Rutgers University. Her work lies at the intersection of family demography and social work, with a focus on the economic circumstances of US families. She is particularly interested in applying computational social science techniques to the collection of state-level data on predatory lending practices and appending this data to surveys of the underbanked and unbanked citizens of the US. Prior to her postdoctoral position, Kasey earned her PhD in demography from Bowling Green State University and was a senior research assistant at the Center for Family & Demographic Research.

Michael FitzGerald

Michael FitzGerald is a PhD student in political science at Rutgers University. His research brings feminist theory to bear on methodological and substantive questions related to gender, democratization, and representation from a comparative perspective. His current project draws on post-structural feminism to develop a gendered methodology of concept formation and applies this framework to the project of formulating a concept of democracy that has greater empirical validity and normative purchase. This concept is dynamically articulated through computational social science approaches including network and text analysis.

Chen-Shuo Hong

Chen-Shuo Hong is currently pursuing a PhD in sociology at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His research interests center on the processes that create inequality. He draws on machine learning, network analysis, and statistics to pursue his questions. Specifically, he seeks to develop computational tools that help researchers and practitioners address social and economic inequality. Outside academia, he has two-year industrial experience of applying big data at Deloitte Consulting in Taiwan.

Chien-shih Huang

Chien-shih Huang is a PhD Candidate at Florida State University. His work lies in the interaction of urban politics and network governance in environmental policy using network and experimental methods. His dissertation focuses on how executive turnover introduce changes in interlocal service delivery and policy adoption in sustainability. He holds an MA and BA in public administration from National Taiwan University.

Kiku Huckle

Kiku Huckle is an assistant professor of Political Science at Pace University in New York City, specializing in the fields of Race and Ethnic Politics, Latino Politics, and Religion and Politics. Her research addresses how culture, values, and identity intersect and ultimately affect political beliefs and patterns of engagement, with an emphasis on race, racial resentment, and religious affiliation.

Yujin (Julia) Jung

Yujin Julia Jung is a doctoral student in political science at the University of Missouri. Her work mainly examines the nexus of international relations and domestic politics, focusing on comparative political behavior. Julia is particularly interested in democracy, foreign policy, and gender studies with a strong methodological interest in machine learning and text analysis. Prior to beginning the PhD program, Julia was a researcher at the Institute of Euro-African Studies and a research fellow at Nuclear Nonproliferation Education and Research Center both based in the Republic of Korea.

Burcu Kolcak

Burcu is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University. She is broadly interested in comparative politics and political methodology. Her research interests include democratization, subnational politics, decentralization, causal inference, spatial analysis, and data visualization. Her recent research project focuses on the effects of decentralization on democratic backsliding.

Sergei Kostiev

Sergei Kostiaev is a student of interest groups and lobbying. His interests also include: American politics, Russian politics, U.S.-Russia relations, U.S. health care policy. He has been supported by various granting bodies – Fulbright program, Legislative fellows program, Russian Humanities Foundation, Russian Basic Science Foundation, etc. He has published in such journals as Journal of Public Affairs, Arab Studies Quarterly, World Economy and International Relations, USA-Canada: Economics, Politics, Culture, etc.

Katie Krumbholz

Katie will be starting her second year as a PhD student at Rutgers in political science. Her major subfield is American politics, and minor subfields are public law and methods. Prior to attending Rutgers, Katie received her MA in Political Science from Iowa State University with a focus on public policy. Her research interests are centered around criminal justice policy and the political behavior they inspire. Particularly, she is interested in the participation of the formerly incarcerated and their friends, families, and community members, which has fueled the social movement that has developed around criminal justice reform.

Manika Lamba

Manika Lamba is a PhD candidate at the Department of Library and Information Science, University of Delhi, India. She completed her MPhil and Master’s degrees in Library and Information Science. She also did a MSc in Plant Biotechnology and BSc(H) in Biochemistry. She has research articles, book chapters, and conference papers at both the national and international levels. She was featured in Information Professionals Share their Top Tips for 2019 blog by Copyright Clearance Center (CCC). She received the best paper award for her work presented at the ICDL2019 conference in New Delhi. Currently, she is writing a book on “Text Mining: An Uncharted Territory for Librarians” soon to be published in Springer Nature. She is an active reviewer for many international journals including IEEE Access, Journal of Medical Internet Research, and Journal of International Medical Research, among others. Her current research interests include digital humanities, information visualization, data analytics, data mining, and scholarly communication.

Kueichun Liu

KueiChun Liu is a PhD student in the Department of Communication at University at Buffalo, the State University of New York. She received her MA in Communication and Information Studies from Rutgers University. Her research interests aim at political and health communication. Currently, she is looking at the online discourse related to COVID-19 in Taiwan.

Daniele Loprieno

Daniele Loprieno is currently pursuing a PhD in Sociology at Rutgers University.  Her research focuses on the formation and impact of social equity policies in recreational cannabis regulatory frameworks. She received her BA in Sociology from Penn State University and her MA in Sociology from California State University, Northridge.

Yi-Ta Lu

Yi-Ta Lu is a PhD candidate in Political Science and a graduate affiliate of the Center for Behavioral Political Economy at Stony Brook University. His research interests include behavioral political economy and computational modeling. Substantive topics include social dilemmas, coalition lobbying, electoral competition, and political polarization. His dissertation concerns the collective action problems in interest group coalitions and how the strength of policy opponents affects their cooperative behavior. The study aims to provide insight into climate negotiation, interest group politics, and human cooperation in general.

Hanjin Mao

Hanjin Mao is a PhD student in Public Administration at Rutgers University-Newark. Her research interests include nonprofit management, nonprofit finance, philanthropy, and volunteerism. Her dissertation project focuses on the financial returns of information technology adoption in nonprofit organizations. She holds a Master of Public Administration from Rutgers University-Newark, and a Bachelor's degree in Political Science from Hohai University in China.

Cristina Monzer

Cristina Monzer is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include political communication, cultural resonance, European international migration and framing processes in public communication. Methodologically, she is interested in comparative approaches, computational social science, and in advancing automated textual analysis methods that reconcile the pattern identification capabilities of computational techniques with the contextual sensitivity of qualitative methodologies. She holds a Research Master’s degree in Communication Science from the University of Amsterdam, and a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology from Ludwig Maximilians University Munich.

Pooneh Mousavi

Pooneh Mousavi is currently pursuing a PhD in computer science at the University of Texas at Dallas. She has an MSc in Computer Science. Before joining the PhD Program, She has been working as a Full Stack  Developer and Technical lead for three years. Her work lies at the intersection of Networks, Dynamics, and Data Sciences; in particular, using natural language processing and computational approaches to discover a pattern in society and learn how people collaborate and communicate to solve social challenges.

Ali Parviz

Ali Parviz is a graduate research assistant pursuing a PhD degree in Computer Science at NJIT. His research interests lie at the intersection of Network Science, Machine Learning, and Theoretical Computer Science with applications in Computational Social Science. He is currently involved in research projects concerning the modeling, analysis, and control of complex networked systems with applications in online social networking, web search, product recommendations, and mobile networks. Most recently, he has been investigating using nonlinear graph diffusions as an alternative way to design algorithms for community detection in large networks. Identifying important communities in a complex network is a highly relevant problem that has applications in many disciplines, such as computer science, physics, neuroscience, social science, biology, and many others.

Krushna Ranaware

Krushna is a PhD candidate in the Social Science program at Syracuse University. Her research focusses on applications of mixed research methods and feminist theories to agricultural policy; her current project examines women’s work in agriculture in the context of public policy shifts in western India. Previously, she assisted with studies on social security programs, agriculture, and nutrition at IGIDR, Mumbai and completed an integrated masters in Economics and Development Studies From IIT-Madras.

Christopher Saint Jean

Christopher Saint Jean is a Political Science doctoral student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. His research interests include the political participation of African Americans, as well as discriminatory policy and legislation created in the United States. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Political Science from CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and is a Ronald E. McNair and Ron Moelis Social Innovation scholar. 

Jayme Schlesinger

Jayme Schlesinger is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Rutgers University. Her dissertation studies the effectiveness of terrorism by highlighting the role of public responses to terrorist events in determining the outcomes for terrorist campaigns. Her research interests more broadly include studying terrorist decision-making and the mobilizing capabilities of terrorist organizations. She applies qualitative and mixed-quantitative approaches to her work with a particular interest in using survey experiments.

Wensong Shen

Wensong Shen is an incoming assistant professor of sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He earned his PhD degree in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2020. His research focuses on education and health, and especially the interaction between education and health in the context of social stratification and inequality. Broadly speaking, he utilizes quantitative methods to explore how individuals and families with different social backgrounds experience the complex process of social stratification, and how such experiences shape their life opportunities and consequences such as education and health.

Inyoung Shin

Inyoung Shin is an assistant faculty associate in the department of communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She earned her PhD from the Department of Communication at Rutgers University in 2019. Her research examines the relationship between new/social media, social networks, community, organization, and democratic engagement. In this broad domain, she is particularly interested in the pervasive nature of new/social media, which exposes individuals to a substantial amount of information about social ties. Focusing on the process through which people develop awareness of thoughts, opinions, and life experiences of social ties, her research addresses social and psychological implications of new technology.

Gabriel Varela

Gabriel Varela is a PhD student in the Sociology department at Duke University. His current research focuses on repeated exposure to media information and the development of cultural frameworks. He draws on a variety of computational methods to approach socio-cultural systems, namely natural language processing and networks. Broadly, he is interested in investigating the intersection of medicine, culture and cognition.

Justin Vinton

Justin is a doctoral student at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations. His primary research areas are in labor and employment relations and organizational structure, with a focus on labor management-management partnership, collaborative work arrangements, high performance work systems, and the changing role of middle management. He also approaches his research with a policy lens as his current projects take place in public education and healthcare settings. As a proponent of mixed methods research, he utilizes both quantitative and qualitative analyses, including qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). Before his doctoral study, he worked at the Education and Employment Research Center at Rutgers, studying the implementation of workforce development programs in community colleges across the US. Justin is also the recipient of the Baden-Württemberg Scholarship to study at the University of Konstanz’s Department of Politics and Public Administration.

Luxuan Wang

Luxuan Wang is a PhD student in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. Before coming to Rutgers, she received an MA in humanities and social thought at New York University. Broadly interested in the social construction of algorithmic power and the consequences of online news consumption, she conducts research examining platform-user relations, and how passive news consumption behaviors associate with misperception.

Maria Wilson

Maria is a PhD student at Rutgers University in Political Science, with a focus on gender and politics. Her work uses both qualitative and quantitative analysis to examine the relationship between campaign finance law and women's political participation in state legislatures. She received her undergraduate degree in Political Science from the University of New Mexico.

Laura Wolton

Laura Wolton is a PhD candidate at the University of Colorado Denver School of Public Affairs. She received a graduate certificate in Science and Technology Policy and MS in Astrophysical, Planetary, and Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Colorado Boulder after receiving a BS in Marine Science from Texas A&M at Galveston. Her research interests include public science agencies, citizen and bureaucratic dissent, campaign narratives, and media coverage of technological disasters. Her dissertation uses semi-automated methods to investigate policy narrative elements, including the social construction of characters, issue frames, and blame.

Jing Yang

Jing Yang is currently pursuing a PhD in Political Science at Rutgers University. Her research primarily focuses on judicial politics in authoritarian regimes. She is particularly interested in applying computational methods to the study of Chinese judicial decisions to examine the patterns of judicial behaviors and the diversity of local courts-politics relationships. Jing holds an MA in Political Science from Duke University. Before coming to Duke, she received her Bachelor of Laws and Master of Laws from China.