Our Faculty

Timm Betz

Associate Professor

Professor Betz asks questions about the political influence of firms, the policy autonomy of governments, and the role of institutions in explaining government and firm behavior in these environments. His research addresses the institutional sources of trade policy and trade openness; the fragmentation of firms across countries and across owners; and how governments manage sovereign debt. Professor Betz also works on challenges in the use of observational data, such as interdependence among observations.

Ted Enamorado

Assistant Professor and Lab Co-Director

Proposes new methods using a combination of statistical and social science principles, along with machine learning techniques, to enhance our understanding of social phenomena. Recently, these methods have been used to study inequities in criminal justice, assess social desirability in survey research, and study political campaign contributions.

Christopher Lucas

Associate Professor and Lab Co-Director

Christopher Lucas studies computational social science. His research develops new methods for analyzing text, audio, and video, which he applies to the study of political communication and media.

Jacob Montgomery

Professor and Former Director

Professor Montgomery’s research focuses on how to use advanced computational methods for core social science tasks including measurement, theory testing, survey research, and causal inference. Substantively, his research focus is on American politics and (more recently) social media.

Lucia Motolinia

Assistant Professor (on leave Fall 2024)

Professor Motolinia's research combines observational data, causal inference, and text-analysis to study the way electoral institutions affect important political outcomes such as political selection, party cohesion, and distributive politics.

Betsy Sinclair

Professor (Thomas F. Eagleton University Professor in Public Affairs and Political Science)

Professor Sinclair’s research interests include American politics and political methodology with an emphasis on individual political behavior. Professor Sinclair focuses on the social foundations of participatory democracy — the ways in which social media influences voting, donating, choosing a candidate or identifying with a particular party.