SISRM Faculty

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
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
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
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
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
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
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