People

Who We Are

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People

Improving societies together.
Worldwide.

Understanding complex social problems is easier when data scientists, social scientists, humanists, and other difference makers can be assembled around the same table. It also means drawing from diverse methods, theories, and perspectives.

At the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research, we’re building an innovative community of scholars who not only pursue collaborative text analytics research using our data, software, and expertise, but are deeply invested in promoting societal well-being. The Cline Center affiliates network includes faculty, students, and staff from six colleges at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and from collaborating institutions spread across five continents. 

The Cline Center is a collaborative enterprise that draws faculty, staff, students, and difference-makers from the public and private sectors into interdisciplinary research projects that address real-world problems. Core staff and faculty members working in our Research Park location manage day-to-day operations involving faculty fellows, graduate fellows, research assistants, interns, and analysts. We also support collaborative projects through our network of faculty and research affiliates spanning the Urbana-Champaign campus as well as other institutions across the globe. 

Here’s who is making a difference with the Cline Center.

Scott Althaus
Scott Althaus
Director
Email:
salthaus@illinois.edu

Director Scott Althaus joined the University of Illinois faculty in 1996 with a joint appointment in the departments of Political Science and Communication. He is currently the Charles J. and Ethel S. Merriam Professor of Political Science and Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois. He is also a faculty affiliate of the School of Information Sciences, the National Center for Supercomputer Applications, the Illinois Informatics Institute, and the Institute for Computing in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Professor Althaus's research and teaching interests explore the communication processes that support political accountability in democratic societies and that empower political discontent in non-democratic societies. His interests focus on four areas of inquiry: (1) how journalists construct news coverage about public affairs, (2) how leaders attempt to shape news coverage for political advantage, (3) how citizens use news coverage for making sense of public affairs, and (4) how the opinions of citizens are communicated to leaders through collective preferences, such as the results of opinion polls, and through collective behaviors, such as civil unrest. He has particular interests in popular support for war, data science methods for extreme-scale analysis of news coverage, cross-national comparative research on political communication, the psychology of information processing, and communication concepts in democratic theory. Professor Althaus serves on the editorial boards of Critical Review, Human Communication Research, Journal of Communication, Political Communication, and Public Opinion Quarterly. His research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, Communication Research, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Political Communication. His book on the political uses of opinion surveys in democratic societies, Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics: Opinion Surveys and the Will of the People (Cambridge University Press, 2003) , was awarded a 2004 Goldsmith Book Prize by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, and a 2004 David Easton Book Prize by the Foundations of Political Theory section of the American Political Science Association. He was named 2014-15 Faculty Fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at UIUC, a 2004-5 Beckman Associate by the UIUC Center for Advanced Studies, and a 2003-4 Helen Corley Petit Scholar by the UIUC College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was honored with a Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UIUC, and his undergraduate and graduate courses regularly appear on the university's "List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students.

Maged Abdel Messeh
Maged Abdel Messeh
Cyberinfrastructure Team
Email:
mmesseh@illinois.edu
Webpage:
Loretta Auvil Profile Pic
Loretta Auvil
Senior Project Coordinator
Email:
lauvil@illinois.edu
Webpage:
Joseph Bajjalieh
Joseph Bajjalieh
Sr. Research Manager
Email:
jbajjal2@illinois.edu
Webpage:
Kelly Hammond Head Shot
Kelly Hammond
Coordinator of Finance and Administration
Email:
hammnd@illinois.edu
Webpage:
Jay Jennings Headshot
Jay Jennings
Research Scientist
Email:
jayjen@illinois.edu

Jay Jennings is a research scientist at the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research and a research fellow at the Center for Media Engagement at University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Temple University in 2015. He studies the media’s role in motivating, discouraging, and informing engagement with the political process. Jay’s work draws on the fields of political communication, public opinion, and political psychology to help us understand the ways the media influences political participation. His research has been published in academic journals such as Political Communication, Public Administration Review, Urban Affairs Review, and Journal of Information Technology & Politics and has been highlighted in such outlets as the Washington Post, NPR’s Weekend Edition, Nieman Journalism Lab, and City Lab.

Michael Martin
Michael Martin
Senior Research Coordinator
Email:
mmarti46@illinois.edu
Webpage:
Peter Nardulli profile pic
Peter Nardulli
Research Professor of Political Science and Founding Director of the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research
Email:
nardulli@illinois.edu

Peter F. Nardulli is Professor of Political Science and Law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the founding Director of the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research, and the editor of a book series with the University of Illinois Press: Democracy, Free Enterprise and the Rule of Law. He has been on the faculty at UIUC since 1974 and served as department head in Political Science from 1992 until 2006. Nardulli is the author of six books on various aspects of the American legal process and empirical democratic theory; he has edited another five books. His most recent works include Popular Efficacy in the Democratic Era: A Re-examination of Electoral Accountability in the U.S., 1828-2000 (Princeton University Press, 2005); Democracy in the 21st Century: Domestic Perspectives (University of Illinois Press, 2008, editor) and Democracy in the 21st Century: International Perspectives (University of Illinois Press, 2008, editor). He has authored a number of articles in journals such at the American Political Science Review, Public Choice, Political Communication, Political Behavior and a number of law reviews. Nardulli is currently directing a global study, the Societal Infrastructures and Development Project (SID). SID uses a number of innovative methodologies to examine the impact of political, legal and economic institutions on a wide range of societal development indicators (economic growth, human rights, societal stability, environmental quality, educational attainment etc.). 

Peyton Buddy profile pic
Buddy Peyton
Analytics and Data Management Team
Email:
peyton@illinois.edu
Webpage:
Tom Redman Profile Pic
Tom Redman
Senior Applications Architect
Email:
t-redman@illinois.edu
Webpage:
Grant Simpson Portrait
Grant Simpson
Software Engineer
Email:
grantls@illinois.edu
Webpage:
Photo of Mr. Ajay Singh PhD
Ajay Singh
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Email:
asingh9@illinois.edu
Webpage:

Mr. Ajay Singh PhD is a postdoctoral research associate at the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research. He received his PhD in 2022 from the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. His research interests are in policing, technology, and surveillance. Singh’s current work examines the influence of technology in policing operations and in community interactions with law enforcement. He is a mixed-methods scholar, who uses archival research, interviews, observations, and structured event data in his research.

Photo of Victor Renn
Victor Renn
Research Assistant
Email:
vrenn2@illinois.edu
Zach Jablow
Zach Jablow
2023 Schroeder Fellow
Email:
Webpage:

Zach’s project will shed light on potential biases in how mass media around the world use the most extreme categories of political violence. Usage of the terms “genocide” and “terrorism” are hotly contested by political actors and commentators. As political and social theorists have noted, the names attached to acts of violence carry strong connotations in the popular imagination and influence the way we conceptualize and respond to them. Using data from the Cline Center’s Global News Index, Zach will explore the groups and states to which both Western and non-Western news media apply these terms. Drawing on previous research on the framing of political violence in news reports, he hypothesizes that mass media shield their home country and its allies from association with these contested terms of violence while readily and disproportionately applying them to their country’s adversaries.

Deli Yang Portrait
Deli Yang
2023 Schroeder Fellow
Email:
Webpage:

Deli Yang's research project examines the impact of political apologies on post-conflict reconciliation. Apology diplomacy is often seen as a way to address historical grievances, but in reality, questions about sincerity can lead to increased conflict and mistrust. A major limitation of existing research is that it does not distinguish between different levels of sincerity in apologies. To address this challenge, this project uses a new database obtained through the Cline Center’s Historical Phoenix Event Data Project and the Archer system to examine how the nature of apologies affects diplomatic relations, alliance ties, and bilateral trade. 

William Barley
William Barley
Assistant Professor of Communication
Email:
barley@illinois.edu
Webpage:
Kathy Baylis
Katherine Baylis
Associate Professor of Agricultural and Consumer Economics
Email:
baylis@illinois.edu
Webpage:
Prof. Catherine Blake
Catherine Blake
Associate Professor of Information Sciences and Associate Director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship
Email:
clblake@illinois.edu

Catherine Blake is an associate professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with affiliate appointments in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Medical Information Science. At the iSchool, she serves as associate director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship and is an active member of the Socio-technical Data Analytics group.

Her primary research goal is to accelerate scientific discovery by synthesizing evidence from text. Her techniques embrace both automated and human approaches that are required to resolve contradictions and redundancies that are inevitable in an information-intensive world.

Blake earned master’s and doctoral degrees in information and computer science at the University of California, Irvine and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science at the University of Wollongong.

Cabral Bigman
Cabral Bigman-Galimore
Assistant Professor of Communication
Email:
cbigman@illinois.edu

Dr. Cabral Bigman’s research focuses on communication about risk and inequality. She is particularly interested in the influence that messages about comparative risk and inequality have on health and communication-related behavior.

Merle Bowen
Merle Bowen
Associate Professor of African American Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, and Political Science
Email:
bowen@illinois.edu

Merle Bowen's intellectual journey in African and related studies began on the African continent, and expanded out from there to other parts of the black world, especially the Americas. Southern Africa generally, and Mozambique more particularly, were the site of her first major scholarly engagement. Her agrarian interests in southern Africa led to another line of inquiry, notably rural sociology and social movements in the African diaspora. Her current research focuses on Brazil’s quilombos or African descended communities struggling for land and livelihood, and critically examines the national quilombo land movement that is fighting for black land rights. Brazil, home to the largest population of people of African descent outside of the African continent, is an ideal location to explore the impact of land reform on class, race, and gender in rural settings.

Jake Bowers
Jake Bowers
Associate Professor of Political Science and Statistics
Email:
jwbowers@illinois.edu

Jake Bowers is a Professor in the Political Science, Statistics and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He is also a Fellow at the White House Social and Behavioral Science Team.

Robert Brunner
Robert Brunner
Professor of Information Sciences and Accountancy
Email:
bigdog@illinois.edu

Robert J. Brunner is a professor in the School of Information Sciences and in the Department of Accountancy in the Gies College of Business. He has affiliate appointments in the Astronomy, Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Informatics, Physics, and Statistics Departments; at the Beckman Institute, in the Computational Science and Engineering program; and at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He is also the Data Science Expert in Residence at the Research Park at the University of Illinois.

His primary research goal focuses on the application of statistical and machine learning to a variety of real-world problems, and in making these efforts easier, faster, and more precise. This work spans fundamental algorithm design to more effectively incorporate uncertainty to optimization using novel computational technologies. More generally, Brunner helps lead efforts to promote data science across campus and to encourage effective data management, analysis, and visualization techniques.

Brunner earned his PhD in astrophysics at the Johns Hopkins University working under Alex Szalay on the development of the science archive for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. His PhD thesis helped develop the statistical approach to quantifying galaxy evolution, where large data are used to place constraints on the original and evolution of the Universe. He subsequently spent five years as a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology working under S. George Djorgovsi and Tom Prince as the project scientist for the Digital Sky project. 

Assistant Professor Peter Christensen
Peter Christensen
Assistant Professor of Agricultural and Consumer Economics
Email:
pchrist@illinois.edu
Dov Cohen
Dov Cohen
Professor of Psychology
Email:
dovcohen@illinois.edu

Dov Cohen has been a faculty member at the University of Illinois and the University of Waterloo in Canada. He is currently professor of psychology with affiliations in the College of Law and the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies.  He is the co-author or co-editor of the books: Handbook of Cultural Psychology, Culture of Honor, and Culture and Social Behavior. Among other topics, he has done research on culture; religion; language use; concepts of face, dignity, and honor; violence; and legal policy and practice.

Stephanie Craft
Stephanie Craft
Associate Professor of Journalism
Email:
scraft@illinois.edu
Ben Crost
Ben Crost
Assistant Professor of Agricultural and Consumer Economics
Email:
bencrost@illinois.edu
Xinyuan Dai
Xinyuan Dai
Associate Professor of Political Science
Email:
xdai@illinois.edu
Webpage:
Jana Diesner
Jana Diesner
Associate Professor of Information Sciences
Email:
jdiesner@illinois.edu

Jana Diesener's research is at the nexus of network analysis, natural language processing and machine learning. In her lab, they develop and advance computational solutions that help people to better understand the interplay and co-evolution of information and socio-technical networks. They bring their solutions into real-world context to solve here and now problems - currently mainly related to impact assessment.

Prof. Travis Dixon
Travis Dixon
Professor of Communication
Email:
tldixon@illinois.edu

Travis Dixon is a media effects scholar dedicated to investigating the prevalence of stereotypes in the mass media and the impact of stereotypical imagery on audience members. He has been honored as a faculty fellow with UIUC's Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society and he was the 2013 Visiting Philanthropy Faculty Scholar at the Clinton School of Public Service. Dr. Dixon has received 7 top paper awards from the National Communication Association and the International Communication Association. He has also received a top article award from the National Communication Association. Dr. Dixon serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Howard Journal of Communications, Media Psychology, and the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media. Much of Dr. Dixon's work has been focused on racial stereotyping in television news. His more recent investigations examine the content and effects of stereotypes and counter-stereotypes in major news events, online news, and musical
contexts.

Bertram Ludäscher
Bertram Ludäscher
Professor of Information Science and Director of the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship
Email:
ludaesch@illinois.edu
Webpage:
Prof. Daniel Gallington
Daniel Gallington
Adjunct Professor of Law
Email:
dgallington@comcast.net

Professor Daniel Gallington is an Adjunct Professor at the Illinois College of Law, where he teaches National Security Law. He also serves on the Advisory Board of the University of Illinois’ Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI) a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence. During more than two decades of service in the United States Air Force and Department of Defense, Prof. Gallington served in a number of senior leadership positions. He helped to coordinate US responses to the 9/11 attacks as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Territorial Security and, subsequently, as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict (SOLIC). He has also held positions in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Defense Policy Board. During the 1990’s Prof. Gallington was General Counsel for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and represented the Department of Justice on the National Security Council (NSC) as that agency’s Deputy Counsel for Intelligence. During the Cold War, he represented the Office of the Secretary of Defense in arms control talks with the Soviet Union and other states. Since his retirement from the military, Prof. Gallington has led a number of projects at  organizations like the George C. Marshall Institute and the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, and published numerous pieces in media outlets including US News and World Report and the Washington Times. He is a two-time (B.S. and J.D.) graduate of the University of Illinois and holds an L.L.M. in international law from the University of Michigan.

Hope Michelson
Hope Michelson
Assistant Professor of Agricultural and Consumer Economics
Email:
hopecom@illinois.edu
Prof. Jeffry Mondak
Jeffery Mondak
James M. Benson Chair in Public Issues and Civic Leadership, and Professor of Political Science
Email:
jmondak@illinois.edu
Scott Poole
Scott Poole
David L. Swanson Professor of Communication, Senior Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and Director of the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
Email:
mspoole@illinois.edu
Webpage:
Jennifer Robbennolt
Jennifer Robbennolt
Associate Dean for Research, Alice Curtis Campbell Professor of Law, Professor of Psychology, and Co-Director of the Illinois Program on Law, Behavior and Social Science
Email:
jrobbenn@illinois.edu

Jennifer Robbennolt is the Associate Dean for Research, Alice Curtis Campbell Professor of Law and 
Professor of Psychology, and Co-Director of ther Illinois Program on Law, Behavior and Social Science. She is a renowned scholar in the area of psychology and law, torts, and dispute resolution. Her research integrates psychology into the study of law and legal institutions, focusing primarily on legal decision-making and the use of empirical research methodology in law.

Sharon Shavitt
Sharon Shavitt
Walter H. Stellner Professor of Marketing and Professor of Psychology
Email:
shavitt@illinois.edu
Webpage:
Chadly Stern
Chadly Stern
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Email:
chadly@illinois.edu
David Tewksbury
David Tewksbury
Executive Associate Dean of College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of Communication
Email:
tewksbur@illinois.edu

David Tewksbury is the Executive Associate Dean of College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a Professor of Communication. He earned his Ph.D. in Communication in 1996 from the University of Michigan. His research interests include the political effects of new communication technologies, the cognitive processing of media messages, and audience news consumption behaviors. With Jason Rittenberg, he wrote News on the Internet: Information and Citizenship in the 21st Century, published by Oxford University Press. He is a former president of the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research and former chair of the International Communication Association’s Mass Communication Division.

Miles Efron
Miles Efron
Associate Professor of Information Sciences
Email:
mefron@illinois.edu
Webpage:
Vetle Torvik
Vetle Torvik
Associate Professor of Information Sciences
Email:
vtorvik@illinois.edu
Alicia Uribe-McGuire
Alicia Uribe-McGuire
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Email:
aburibe@illinois.edu
Nikki Usher
Nikki Usher
Associate Professor of Journalism
Email:
nusher@illinois.edu
Donna Cox
Donna Cox
Professor in the School of Art and Design at the College of Fine and Applied Arts
Email:
donnacox@illinois.edu

Donna J. Cox, MFA, PhD, is the University of Illinois’s first Michael Aiken Chair, Director of the Advanced Visualization Laboratory (AVL) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Director of the Illinois Emerging Digital Research and Education in Arts Media Institute (eDream), and Professor in the School of Art and Design at the College of Fine and Applied Arts. She is a member of the NCSA leadership team, and is a recognized pioneer in scientific visualization for public outreach and education and originator of the collaborative model of Renaissance Teams and the concept of visaphors (digital metaphors of computational science).

Through public outreach projects, Dr. Cox and her collaborators have inspired millions with cinematic virtual tours through astrophysics, earth sciences, engineering, and other data domains. AVL’s work is shared through venues such as international digital-dome museum shows, high-definition documentary television programs, and IMAX movies.

The Chicago Museum of Science and Industry selected Dr. Cox as one of 40 modern Leonardo DaVinci’s. As Director of eDream Institute, she is working with Illinois campus leadership to build a new interdisciplinary academic research and education program that includes visualization and interactive performance.

Shaowen Wang
Shaowen Wang
Professor and Department Head of Geography and Geographic Information Science
Email:
shaowen@illinois.edu

Shaowen Wang is a Professor of Geography and Geographic Information Science (Primary), Computer Science, Library and Information Science, and Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where he is named a Centennial Scholar in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He is also Associate Director for CyberGIS and a Senior Research Scientist of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and Founding Director of the CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies and CyberInfrastructure and Geospatial Information Laboratory. He holds affiliate appointments within UIUC’s Computational Science and Engineering Graduate Program and Illinois Informatics Institute. He received his BS in Computer Engineering from Tianjin University in 1995, MS in Geography from Peking University in 1998, and MS of Computer Science and PhD in Geography from the University of Iowa in 2002 and 2004 respectively. His research and teaching interests center on three interrelated themes: 1) computational and geographic information sciences; 2) advanced cyberinfrastructure, cyberGIS, and geospatial data science; and 3) multi-scale geospatial problem solving and spatiotemporal analytics. His research has been actively supported by multiple US government agencies and industry. He has published a number of peer-reviewed papers including articles in more than 15 journals. He has served as an Action Editor of GeoInformatica, and guest editor or editorial board member for seven other journals, book series and proceedings. He is serving as the President of the International Association of Chinese Professionals in Geographic Information Sciences. He served on the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science Board of Directors from 2009 to 2012, and was appointed two terms as a Councilor of the Open Science Grid Consortium. He was a visiting scholar at Lund University sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2006 and NCSA Fellow in 2007, and received the NSF CAREER Award in 2009.

Lesley Wexler
Lesley Wexler
John D. Colombo Professor of Law
Email:
lmwexler@illinois.edu

Lesley Wexler joined the Illinois Law School faculty in fall 2010, teaching torts, laws of war and international environmental law. Before coming to Illinois, Professor Wexler taught at the Florida State University College of Law. Prior to teaching at Florida State, she spent two years at the University of Chicago Law School as a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer on Law.

Professor Wexler has broad research interests in international humanitarian law, human rights law, and sex discrimination. Professor Wexler specializes in those legal areas that reflect the movement of anti-discrimination and humanitarian norms through domestic law, international law, social movements, and corporations. She has written on the legitimacy of targeting decisions, the blood diamond trade, and the regulation of depleted uranium and landmines, along with a series of articles on human rights impact statements. Her work has drawn on case studies using DeBeers, Wal-Mart, and Chik-fil-A.

Brant Houston
Brant Houston
John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting, and Professor of Journalism
Email:
houstonb@illinois.edu
Robin F. Wilson
Robin F. Wilson
Roger and Stephany Joslin Professor of Law, Director of the Program in Family Law and Policy, Director of the Epstein Health Law and Policy Program
Email:
wils@illinois.edu
Webpage:
Verity Winship
Verity Winship
Professor of Law
Email:
vwinship@illinois.edu

Verity Winship’s academic interests are in the area of business law and complex litigation. Specifically, her research focuses on corporate litigation, securities enforcement, and disputes that cross legal systems. Her articles have appeared in such journals as the Vanderbilt Law Review, the Delaware Journal of Corporate Law, and the Stanford Journal of Complex Litigation. Professor Winship is chair of the AALS securities regulation section (2016-17) and is on the executive committee of the AALS civil procedure section. She is a regular radio commentator for “Legal Issues in the News,” WILL-AM-FM Illinois Public Radio.

Professor Winship is an honors graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where she served as an executive editor of the Harvard Law Review. Upon graduation, she clerked for Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, and then for Judge Marjorie O. Rendell, United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. She also practiced law with WilmerHale in New York City in the area of securities enforcement and litigation.

Prof. Alyssa Prorok Photo
Alyssa Prorok
Associate Professor in the Political Science
Email:
aprorok@illinois.edu
Nora Webb Williams
Nora Webb Williams
Assistant Professor
Email:
nww3@illinois.edu
Cara Wong
Cara Wong
Associate Professor of Political Science and of Asian American Studies
Email:
carawong@illinois.edu

Cara Wong is Associate Professor of Political Science and of Asian American Studies. Wong is author of Boundaries of Obligation in American Politics (2010, Cambridge University Press), and she has published numerous articles in edited volumes and journals, including the Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Political Behavior. Her work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, University of Michigan, and University of Illinois. Wong holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and her areas of specialization are public opinion and political behavior; political psychology; race and ethnicity; and citizenship and immigration.

James Kuklinski
James Kuklinski
Professor Emeritus of Political Science
Email:
kuklinsk@illinois.edu

 

James Kuklinski is Matthew T. McClure Professor in the Department of Political Science at UIUC and also a faculty member in the Institute of Government and Public Affairs. His work focuses on public opinion and political psychology, including the extent of misinformation among citizens and their interpretations of events in ways that help them maintain their existing beliefs and preferences. Recently, he and coauthors have been asking whether and how random assignment experiments can be used to study and understand a world that is not random. His recent Institute work has investigated ways to broaden citizen participation in the crucially important and poorly understood reapportionment process that occurs every ten years.

Stephen Chaudoin
Stephen Chaudoin
Assistant Professor of Government (Harvard University)
Email:
chaudoin@fas.harvard.edu

Stephen Chaudoin is interested in international institutions, international political economy, and formal and quantitative methods. His research contributes to questions of how international institutions affect member state behavior. Existing theories focus on domestic enforcement mechanisms associated with international cooperation. His theoretical work examines how the preferences, political strength, and strategic behavior of domestic actors facilitate and constrain domestic enforcement mechanisms. His empirical work has tested these theories in settings ranging from international trade and the WTO to war crimes and the ICC as well as environmental contexts.

Prof. JungHwan Yang
JungHwan Yang
Assistant Professor of Communication
Email:
junghwan@illinois.edu
Mike Yao
Mike Yao
Associate Professor of Digital Media, Advertising, and Journalism
Email:
mzyao@illinois.edu

Prof. Yao is a Principal Investigator of the The Technology and Social Behavior (TSB) Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  The lab brings together student researchers interested in technology-mediated social behavior to study how features and affordances of technology enable or constrain people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

 

Eric Gartzke
Eric Gartzke
Professor of Political Science and Director of cPASS (University of California, San Diego)
Email:
egartzke@ucsd.edu
Webpage:
Robert Lawless
Robert Lawless
Max L. Rowe Professor of Law and co-director of the Program on Law
Email:
rlawless@illinois.edu

Robert Lawless is the Max L. Rowe Professor of Law and co-director of the Program on Law, Behavior and Social Science. He served as the College's associate dean for research from 2013-16.

Lawless specializes in bankruptcy, consumer credit, and business law. He is a new co-author for the eighth edition of Secured Transactions: A Systems Approach, a leading textbook on secured transactions. He also joins Professors Jennifer K. Robbennolt and Thomas S. Ulen as the co-author of Empirical Methods in Law, a textbook on empirical methodologies as applied to the study of law and newly released in a second edition in 2016.

Professor Lawless administers and contributes to the blog Credit Slips, a discussion on credit, finance, and bankruptcy. He also participates in the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, a long-term research project studying persons who file bankruptcy. Professor Lawless is a member of the American Law Institute, the National Bankruptcy Conference, and the American College of Bankruptcy. He has testified before Congress, and his work has been featured in media outlets such as CNN, CNBC, NPR, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the National Law Journal, the L.A. Times, and the Financial Times. Professor Lawless is also one of the College's regular contributors to Legal Issues in the News on WILL-AM 580.

A native Illinoisan, Professor Lawless earned both his undergraduate degree in accounting and his law degree from the University of Illinois. During law school, he served as editor-in-chief of the University of Illinois Law Review. Prior to joining the Illinois faculty in 2006, Professor Lawless was the Gordon & Silver, Ltd., Professor of Law at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law. From 1993 to 2002, he was on the faculty at the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law, and he has been a visiting faculty member at the University of Illinois, Ohio State University, and Washington University in St. Louis. Professor Lawless began his career as a law clerk for the Honorable Harlington Wood, Jr., of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and then practiced law in Washington, D.C., with the firm of Zuckert, Scoutt & Rasenberger.

Tom Ginsburg
Tom Ginsburg
Leo Spitz Professor of International Law, Ludwig and Hilde Wolf Research Scholar, and Professor of Political Science (University of Chicago)
Email:
tginsburg@uchicago.edu
Webpage:
Sarah Hummel
Sarah Hummel
Visiting Assistant Professor of Government (Harvard University)
Email:
sarah_hummel@fas.harvard.edu
Sally Jackson
Sally Jackson
Professor of Communication
Email:
sallyj@illinois.edu
Kiju Jung
Kiju Jung
Senior Lecturer (Sydney Business School, Australia)
Email:
kiju.jung@sydney.edu.au
Webpage:
Jose Cheibub
Jose Cheibub
Mary Thomas Marshall Professor in Liberal Arts and Professor of Political Science (Texas A&M University)
Email:
cheibub@tamu.edu
Webpage:
Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider
Jodi Schneider
Assistant Professor of Informatics
Email:
jodi@illinois.edu
Dan Roth
Dan Roth
Eduardo D. Glandt Distinguished Professor of Computer and Information Science (University of Pennsylvania)
Email:
danroth@seas.upenn.edu

Dan Roth's research focuses on the computational foundations of intelligent behavior. His group develop theories and systems pertaining to intelligent behavior using a unified methodology -- at the heart of which is the idea that learning has a central role in intelligence. 

His work centers around the study of machine learning and inference methods to facilitate natural language understanding. In doing that he has pursued several interrelated lines of work that span multiple aspects of this problem - from fundamental questions in learning and inference and how they interact, to the study of a range of natural language processing (NLP) problems. Over the last few years the focus of his natural language understanding work has been the development of constrained conditional models -- an integer linear programming formulation for (jointly) learning and supporting global inference. Within this framework he has studied fundamental learning and inference issues -- from learning with indirect supervision to response driven learning to decomposed learning to amortized inference -- and addressed multiple problems in semantics and information extraction. In particular, he has developed state of the art solutions and systems for semantic role labeling, co-reference resolutions, and textual entailment as well as named entity recognition, Wikification and other information extraction problems. A lot of his recent work has also emphasized the notion of incidental supervision as a way to get around the inherent difficulty in supervising complex problems. He has also worked on fundamental problems in Natural Language Acquisition, ESL, and Information Trustworthiness. Over the last decade he has also developed a declarative Learning Based Programming language, LBJava, for the rapid development of software systems with learned components; his group is  currently working on Saul, a next generation Declarative Learning Based Program. 

Jen Selin
Jen Selin
Assistant Professor of American Politics (University of Missouri)
Email:
selinj@missouri.edu

Jennifer L. Selin is a Kinder Institute Assistant Professor of Constitutional Democracy in the University of Missouri’s Department of Political Science.  She holds a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University, a J.D. from Wake Forest University, and a B.A. from Lebanon Valley College.  Prior to joining academia, Professor Selin practiced administrative law and specialized in federal electricity market regulation and alternative energy development, licensing, and regulation. 

Stuart Soroka
Stuart Soroka
Michael W. Traugott Professor of Communication Studies and Political Science (University of Michigan)
Email:
ssoroka@umich.edu
Webpage:
Ruby Mendenhall
Ruby Mendenhall
Associate Professor of African American Studies
Email:
rubymen@illinois.edu

 

Ruby Mendenhall is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She holds joint faculty appointments in Sociology, African American Studies, Urban and Regional Planning, and Social Work. She is currently a Faculty member at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and a Faculty Affiliate at the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Women and Gender in Global Perspective, and Gender and Women Studies. She is the recipient of the Richard and Margaret Romano Professorial Scholar for outstanding achievements in research and leadership on campus. She is also a Grand Challenge Learning Teaching Fellow in the Health Track. Mendenhall’s research focuses on racial microaggressions in higher education. She examines how living in racially segregated neighborhoods with high levels of violence affects Black mothers’ mental and physical health using qualitative, quantitative and genomic analysis. She is attempting to recover Black women’s lost history by using topic modeling and data visualization to examine over 800,000 documents from 1740 to 2014. Mendenhall also does research on racial microaggressions and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). She teaches the following courses: Research Methods; Social Stratification; Urban Communities and Public Policy; Black Women in Contemporary U.S. Society; Genes and Behavior: Black Mothers in Englewood from Science to Society; and Stress and Health in Urban Communities. Her research has appeared in academic journals such as Social Forces, Social Science Research, Demography, Housing Policy Debate, The Review of Black Political Economy, The Black Scholar, and Social Service Review. 

Milan Svolik
Milan Svolik
Associate Professor of Political Science (Yale)
Email:
milan.svolik@yale.edu
Webpage:
Avital Livny
Avital Livny
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Email:
alivny@illinois.edu
Webpage:
Wouter Van Atteveldt
Wouter Van Atteveldt
Associate Professor of Political Communication (VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Email:
wouter@vanatteveldt.com
Zachary Elkins
Zachary Elkins
Associate Professor of Political Science (University of Texas — Austin)
Email:
zelkins@austin.utexas.edu
Webpage:
Hartmut Wessler
Hartmut Wessler
Professor of Media and Communication (Mannheim University, Germany)
Email:
marianne.valigura@uni-mannheim.de