SISRM Faculty

Paul Poast

Paul Poast

Director, Summer Institute in Social Research Methods; Associate Professor, Department of Political Science

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.

Course Faculty

Alexander Hoffman

Alexander Hoffman

Teaching Fellow in the Social Sciences (2021-2023)

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.

Kerry Ledoux

Kerry Ledoux

Assistant Instructional Professor in Psychology and the College

Kerry Ledoux has been an Assistant Instructional Professor at the University since 2014, first in the Social Sciences Division of the College, and then in the Psychology Department beginning in 2018.  Kerry teaches the Topics in Behavioral and Social Sciences Relevant to Medicine course that introduces undergraduates interested in health professions to the importance of the social sciences to medicine. She also teaches in the College’s Mind series, and has taught classes in Psychology including Sensation and Perceptionand The Disordered Mind.  Kerry earned her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before going on to do postdoctoral research at the University of California, Davis.  She then worked as a Research Associate in the Department of Neurology at Johns Hopkins before coming to the University of Chicago. Kerry’s research interests are in psycholinguistics; she has used behavioral and electrophysiological measures to study language comprehension in adults, children, and in patient populations (including autism, schizophrenia, and aphasia).

Christopher Roark

Christopher Roark

Assistant Instructional Professor, Department of Economics

Christopher Roark is a Lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. His research interests include International Macroeconomics, International Finance, and Macroeconomic Labor. He holds a PhD in Economics from Duke University.

Benjamin Schapiro

Benjamin Schapiro

Principal Research Analyst, NORC

Benjamin is also part of the NORC GSS Team. The General Social Survey (GSS) is a nationally representative survey of adults in the United States conducted since 1972. The GSS collects data on contemporary American society in order to monitor and explain trends in opinions, attitudes and behaviors. NORC at the University of Chicago conducts research and analysis that decision-makers trust. As a nonpartisan research organization and a pioneer in measuring and understanding the world, NORC has studied almost every aspect of the human experience and every major news event for more than eight decades. NORC partners with government, corporate, and nonprofit clients around the world to provide the objectivity and expertise necessary to inform the critical decisions facing society.

Yanyan Sheng

Yanyan Sheng

Senior Lecturer, Committee on Quantitative Methods in Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences

Yanyan Sheng is Senior Lecturer of the Committee on Quantitative Methods in Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2005. Her primary research interests focus on modeling dichotomous responses in educational and psychological measurement using advanced modern statistics, specifically, on developing and applying complex, yet efficient Bayesian hierarchical item response models. She has also been collaborating with her colleagues in areas such as science assessment, game-based learning, health education where she applies statistical/measurement methods to real data conditions.

Prior to joining the university, Sheng was a Professor of Quantitative Methods at Southern Illinois University (SIU), where she has taught graduate-level courses in educational measurement and statistics for fourteen years. She was recipient of the 2006 APA Division 5 (Measurement, Evaluation & Statistics) Distinguished Dissertation Award, and the 2014 SIU COEHS Scholar Excellence Award.

Jaesok Son

Jaesok Son

Research Scientist, NORC

Jaesok is part of the NORC GSS Team. The General Social Survey (GSS) is a nationally representative survey of adults in the United States conducted since 1972. The GSS collects data on contemporary American society in order to monitor and explain trends in opinions, attitudes and behaviors. NORC at the University of Chicago conducts research and analysis that decision-makers trust. As a nonpartisan research organization and a pioneer in measuring and understanding the world, NORC has studied almost every aspect of the human experience and every major news event for more than eight decades. NORC partners with government, corporate, and nonprofit clients around the world to provide the objectivity and expertise necessary to inform the critical decisions facing society.

Faculty Partners for the 2022 SISRM RA Program

Eman Abdelhadi

Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Human Development; Provost Postdoctoral Fellow

Burcu Pinar Alakoc

Associate Instructional Professor, Committee on International Relations

Michael Albertus

Associate Professor, Department of Political Science

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson

Associate Professor of British History, Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the College

Luc Anselin

Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology and the College, Director of the Center for Spatial Data Science, Senior Fellow at NORC

Evelyn Atkinson

Teaching Fellow in the Social Sciences, Law, Letters and Society

Leora Auslander

Arthur and Joann Rasmussen Professor in Western Civilization in the College, Professor of European Social History

Crystal Bae

Assistant Instructional Professor of GIScience in the Division of the Social Sciences and the College

Akram Bakkour

Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology

Margaret Beale Spencer

Charles L. Grey Distinguished Service Professor, Comparative Human Development and the College; Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education and Life Course Development

Kathleen Cagney

Professor of Sociology, Director of the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research

Marisa Casillas

Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Human Development

Elizabeth Chatterjee

Assistant Professor, Environmental History and the College

Pradeep Chintagunta

Joseph T. and Bernice S. Lewis Distinguished Service Professor of Marketing, Booth School of Business

Alexandra Ciomek

Postdoctoral Scholar, Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation & the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice

Christopher Clapp

Assistant Instructional Professor, Harris School of Public Policy

Ellen Compernolle

Post-Doctoral Scholar, Division of Social Sciences, NORC

Giovanni Compiani

Assistant Professor of Marketing, Booth School of Business

Jane Dailey

Professor of American History, the Law School, and the College

Milena Djourelova

Post-Doctoral Scholar, Department of Economics

Laura Finch

Research Scientist, NORC

Matthew Furlong

Social Science Teaching Fellow, Pozen Family Center for Human Rights

Marco Garrido

Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology

Susan Goldin-Meadow

Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Psychology; Committee on Human Development

Alessandra Gonzalez

Senior Research Associate, Department of Economics

Tori Gross

Earl S. Johnson Instructor, Department of Anthropology; MAPSS

Robert Gulotty

Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science

James Heckman

Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and the College; Director of the Center for the Economics of Human Development

Anne Henly

Senior Instructional Professor in Psychology and the College; Director, Undergraduate Studies in Psychology and Undergraduate Research Initiative in Psychology

Marc Hernandez

Principal Research Scientist, NORC

Ariel Kalil

Professor, Harris School of Public Policy

Katherine D Kinzler

Professor, Department of Psychology

Matthew Knisley

PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology

Susan Lambert

Professor; Co-Director, Employment Instability, Family Well-being, and Social Policy Network, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice

Yuan Chang Leong

Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology

Benjamin Lessing

Associate Professor, Department of Political Science

Qinyun Lin

Postdoctoral Scholar, Center for Spatial Data Science

Raymond Lodato

Assistant Instructional Professor, Program on the Global Environment

Jonathan Lyon

Associate Professor of Medieval History and the College, Department of History

Casey Mulligan

Professor, Department of Economics

Vesall Nourani

Senior Research Associate, Department of Economics

Molly Offer-Westort

Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science

Ada Palmer

Associate Professor of Early Modern European History and the College

Jeremy Pearce

Post-Doctoral Scholar, Department of Economics

James Robinson

The Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies; Institute Director, The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts

Monica Rosenberg

Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology

Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and the College

Diana Schwartz-Francisco

Assistant Instructional Professor, Center for Latin American Studies

Sabina Shaikh

Senior Lecturer, Environmental and Urban Studies in the College and Committee on Geographical Sciences in the Social Sciences Division

Alex Shaw

Associate Professor, Department of Psychology

Jaesok Son

Research Scientist, NORC

Emily Talen

Professor, Division of the Social Sciences; Director, Urbanism Lab

Robert Vargas

Associate Professor, Department of Sociology; Deputy Dean

Fan Yang

Research Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology

Zhang

Post-Doctoral Scholar, Department of Psychology