Paul Poast is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His research on international relations and quantitative methodology has been funded by the National Science Foundation and has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Political Analysis, among others. Paul received his PhD from the University of Michigan (where his dissertation won the Peace Science Society’s Walter Isard Award), an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a BA from Miami University. Prior to Chicago, Paul was an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University and, before beginning his PhD, Paul taught in the Department of Economics at The Ohio State University.

Crystal Bae is Assistant Instructional Professor of GIScience in the Division of the Social Sciences and the College. Her research in spatial cognition focuses on geographic movement visualization, real-world navigation, cognition of neighborhoods and regions, and social decision making. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography with an Emphasis in Cognitive Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is a former postdoc of the Movement Data Science Lab at UCSB.

Caterina Fugazzola is a sociologist whose research interests include social movements, gender and sexuality studies, transnational sociology, and qualitative research methods. Her book project, Words Like Water: Queer Mobilization and Social Change in China, currently under contract with Temple University Press, focuses on sexual identity organizing in the People’s Republic of China, and examines strategies for social change in a political context that precludes avenues for direct political engagement. Her work is based on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and rhetorical analysis of online contexts, and takes the contemporary tongzhi (LGBT) movement in the People’s Republic of China as a case in which grassroots groups have achieved significant social change in virtual absence of public protest, and under conditions of tightening governmental control over civil society groups. Her future work will continue engaging with the tactical use of language and culture, looking at the way narratives, discourses, and identities interact with—and contribute to—processes of social change.

Alex received his BA in history and political science from the University of Southern California in 2012 and his PhD in US History from the University of Chicago in 2021. He specializes in the history of the American South, examining how the region was less an exception to than a bellwether of national trends. His diverse interests cohere around a central driving force: using an interdisciplinary approach to explain the bizarre, the weird, and the seemingly out of place by tracing the conditions of possibility that enable particular thoughts, events, and movements to transpire at specific moments in time. Alex has recently written about postbellum efforts to induce immigration to the American South and the controversies surrounding the corpse of John Wilkes Booth. His dissertation examines how white Southerners continued to work through the violence and destruction of the Civil War through spectacles of the body for fifty years following Appomattox.

Jean Clipperton is the Associate Director of MACSS and an Associate Senior Instructional Professor. She teaches courses in data visualization, programming (in R and in Python), agent-based modeling, research design, in addition to our pre-matriculation Computational Math Camp. She holds a doctorate in Political Science from the University of Michigan, including a Graduate Certificate in Teaching from the university’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching and a Graduate Certificate in Complex Systems, also from the University of Michigan.

Murilo Ramos received his PhD in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 2022. His fields of concentration are political economy and applied econometrics. During his PhD, he investigated how threats of audits against corruption impact expenditure in the local government in Brazil and the relationship between campaign financing and corruption. He has been teaching economics for more than a decade, with a focus on econometrics and statistics. Before joining the University of Chicago in 2022, Ramos received pedagogical training at the University of California at Berkeley and hosted workshops on teaching economics at the same school.