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

Crystal Bae

Crystal Bae

Assistant Instructional Professor of GIScience

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.

Jean Clipperton

Jean Clipperton

Associate Director, MACSS; Associate Senior Instructional Professor

Dr. Clipperton is the Associate Director of MACSS and Associate Senior Instructional Professor. She is a political scientist with concentrations in comparative politics, political methodology, and complex systems. Her research focuses on questions of institutional design and change and she primarily teaches courses on agent based modeling, research design, data visualization, and introductory programming.

Her research focuses on questions of institutional design and past work has explored the transposition of EU directives among the EU 15 (PhD dissertation, Clipperton 2016) and status within the discipline of political science (Alter et al 2020). She’s also developed work on the science of teaching and learning within the social sciences, emphasizing teaching quantitative methods.

Caterina Fugazzola

Caterina Fugazzola

Assistant Senior Instructional Professor

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.

She holds a PhD and an MA in Sociology from the University of Chicago, an MA in Asia Pacific Studies from the University of San Francisco, and a BA in Languages and Economic and Legal Institutions of East Asia from Ca’Foscari University of Venice. Prior to joining the Global Studies Program, she was an Earl S. Johnson Instructor in Sociology in the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS) at the University of Chicago.

Alexander Hofmann

Alexander Hofmann

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.

Murilo Ramos

Murilo Ramos

Assistant Instructional Professor Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics, University of Chicago

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.

Frederica Rockwood

Frederica Rockwood

Teaching Fellow in the Social Sciences

Frederica Rockwood teaches a course in Emotion and Motivation for the Department of Psychology, as well as lecturing in the Core course, “The Mind.” She focuses on the interconnections between emotions and physiological function, including their impact on motivation and behavior. Emotions are complex phenomena that coordinate changes within the body to help us achieve our goals. Conversely, our understanding of internal bodily signals contributes to the generation of emotional states. Rockwood’s research examines these connections in both individual and social contexts. Her dissertation work examined whether changes in an individual’s physiological context, particularly cardiac and immune function, impact the way they perceive and act towards others.

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 2023 SISRM RA Program

Michael Albertus

Associate Professor, Department of Political Science

Alexander Arroyo

Senior Research Associate in Global Political Ecology, Urban Theory Lab and CEGU.

Evelyn Atkinson

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

Crystal Bae

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

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

Marc Berman

Associate Professor; Associate Chair, Department of Psychology

Thomas Best

Manager of Research Analytics at the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science and Innovation.

Christina Brown

Assistant Professor, Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics.

Leo Burzstyn

The Saieh Family Professor of Economics at the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics.

Alexandra Ciomek

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

Shannon Dawdy

Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College.

Steven Durlauf

Steans Professor in Educational Policy and the Director of the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.

Eve Ewing

Associate Professor Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity.

Michelle Friedner

Associate Professor, Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Comparative Human Development.

Chiara Galli

Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Human Development.

Adom Getachow

Neubauer Family Associate Professor of Political Science and the College.

Julian Go

Professor and Director of Graduate Studies; Faculty Affiliate in the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture; The Committee on International Relations; Senior Fellow, Society of Fellows, the College

Susan Goldin-Meadow

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

Alessandra Gonzalez

Senior Research Associate, Department of Economics

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

Melissa Howe

Senior Research Scientist, NORC

James Iveniuk

Senior Research Scientist, NORC

Juanna Joensen

Research Associate Professor, Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics

Ashani Johnson-Turbes

Director of the Center on Equity Research and Vice President of The Bridge, NORC.

Ariel Kalil

Professor, Harris School of Public Policy

Leslie Kay

Professor, Department of Psychology.

Matthew Knisley

PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology

Savitri Kunze

Teaching Fellow, Pozen Center for Human Rights in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division.

Stacy Loewe

Senior Research Scientist, NORC.

Susan Mayer

Professor Emeritus, Harris School of Public Policy.

John McCormick

Professor, Department of Political Science.

Molly Offer-Westort

Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science

Brianne Painia

Assistant Instructional Professor in Sociology

Ada Palmer

Associate Professor of Early Modern European History and the College

Patricia Posey

Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science.

Eugene Raikhel

Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Human Development; Director, Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies

Augustus Rose

Assistant Professor of Practice in the Arts, Department of English Language and Literature.

Monica Rosenberg

Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology

Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

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

Kristen Schilt

Associate Professor, Department of Sociology.

Ebony Scott-Anderson

External Affairs Director, Inclusive Economy Lab.

Jamshid Sourati

Post-doctoral Scholar, Department of Sociology.

Paul Staniland

Professor, Department of Political Science; faculty chair of the Committee on International Relations (CIR).

Emily Talen

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

Andres Uribe

PhD candidate, Department of Political Science.

Fan Yang

Research Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology

Luigi Zingales

Robert C. McCormack Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance, Booth School of Business.