PRISM Fellows

The Program in Statistics and Methodology supports two PRISM fellows each academic year. The applications for the Junior and Senior PRISM fellows can be downloaded here: (junior.doc) (junior.pdf) (senior.doc) (senior.pdf). For the AY 2008-2009, the fellows are:

Byungwon Woo, Senior Fellow: woo.54@polisci.osu.edu

Byungwon Woo studies international relations, political methodology, and formal theory. Within IR, Byungwon concentrates on international political economy and international institutions. His dissertation seeks to theoretically understand how domestic interests and institutions influence the design and implementation of international economic agreements and to empirically examine the design of IMF conditionality. His methodological interests are eclectic; among others, he is particularly interested in event history analysis and EITM - empirical implications of theoretical models.

Yoon-Ah Oh, Junior Fellow: oh.146@polisci.osu.edu

Yoon-Ah Oh is a Ph.D. candidate in comparative politics. Her research interests include comparative government and politics, comparative political economy, decentralization and local governance, international influence on domestic politics, ethnic politics, and methodology. Her dissertation research examines the impact of international labor migration on democracy and development in developing countries. Yoon-Ah has a methods interest in matching and spatial analysis and hopes to further develop her methodological skills as PRISM Junior Fellow. She is also interested in qualitative research methods in the developing country context. She conducted extensive fieldwork in Burma/Myanmar for her MA thesis.

Past PRISM Fellows

Dino Christenson, Senior PRISM Fellow AY 2007-2008: christenson.24@osu.edu

Dino P. Christenson studies voting behavior and survey research methodology, with subsequent concentrations in bureaucracies and interest groups. Methodologically, he focuses on longitudinal data, random effects, bayesian and matching models. Prior to graduate school, he spent three years working in politics.

Scott Powell, Junior PRISM Fellow AY 2007-2008: powell.413@polisci.osu.edu

Scott Powell is a Ph.D. student in Political Science, with specializations in Comparative Politics, Political Economy, and Methodology. He received his B.A. in Political Science from Michigan State University in East Lansing, MI. His research interests include the political economy of social welfare, with a particular emphasis on labor market policies in OECD governments, as well as comparative institutions and political parties. Scott hopes to use his time as Junior Fellow to develop his interests in optimization, time-series cross-section models, and processes of spatial and temporal diffusion.

Anand Sokhey, Senior PRISM Fellow AY 2006-2007: sokhey.2@polisci.osu.edu

Anand Sokhey is a Ph.D. candidate in American politics. He received his B.A. from Denison University in Granville, OH, and his M.A. in political science from Ohio State. Anand’s research interests include voting behavior, public opinion, elite behavior, religion and politics, and methodology; he is particularly interested in multi-level models, survival models, and survey research. His dissertation focuses on the role of interpersonal discussion networks and organizational involvements (and the interface between the two) in voting behavior.

Quintin Beazer, Junior PRISM Fellow AY 2006-2007: beazer.1@osu.edu

Quintin H. Beazer is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Politics and Political Economy at Ohio State University. Substantively, his areas of focus involve economic and institutional reform in Russia and other postcommunist countries. Current projects in this area include dissertation work on the political impediments to improved property rights in the region, a coauthored paper on the interactive effect of budgetary shifts and regime type on government spending, and an investigation into the sources of lobbying power in transition economies. After serving as PRISM Junior Fellow, Quintin has continued to explore further his methodological interests in event history in a coauthored project applying conditional frailty models to a long-standing debate in the literature on international conflict. To complement his experience in statistical methods, Quintin has been busy in both the Political Science and Economics departments improving his game theory and formal modeling skills.

Roman Ivanchenko, Senior PRISM Fellow AY 2005-2006: ivanchenko.1@osu.edu

Roman Ivanchenko is an Analyst with the Joint Warfare Analysis Center in Dahlgren, VA. He received his Ph.D. from the Ohio State University in June, 2007. His dissertation focused on the interactions between the United States Supreme Court and Congress. His academic interests include mathematical modeling of judicial and legislative interactions, statistical analyses of survival, time-series, and multilevel data, and statistical computing.

Lyndsey Young, Junior PRISM Fellow AY 2005-2006: stanfill.5@osu.edu

Lyndsey Young is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at the Ohio State University. She received both her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Louisville. As a third year student of American Politics, she possesses specialized research and teaching interests in four subfields: (1) legislative organization and behavior, (2) political parties and interest groups, (3) state politics, and (4) gender and identity politics. Lyndsey’s current research projects examine the impact of elite behavior on institutional design, the effect of gender on party campaign finance, and the consequences of party decentralization on electoral outcomes. Lyndsey also has a methods interest in areas such as duration models, spatial models, multilevel models, and survey research design, and she hopes to further her methodological interests as the departments PRISM junior fellow.

Sean Williams, Senior PRISM Fellow AU 2005: sean@socialscience.net

Sean Williams is currently an Analyst at Social Science Automation, Inc. His research interests focus on institutions and formal theory, with a particular emphasis on EITM (Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models). His projects include a formal analysis of how the US Senate’s rules slow down a president’s confirmations, and another formal model of signaling behavior between actors in a judicial hierarchy.

David Darmofal, Senior PRISM Fellow AY 2004-2005: darmofal@gwm.sc.edu

David Darmofal was the Senior PRISM Fellow during the 2004-2005 academic year. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of South Carolina. He has research interests in political behavior, American political development, and political methodology. His substantive research focuses on elite-mass interactions and how these interactions shape opinion formation, political participation, and citizen competence. Much of this research employs an historical lens, including a research project on voter participation in the United States since the 1820s. His methodological research interests include spatial analysis, survival analysis, and time series analysis. His research has been published in Political Geography, Political Research Quarterly, and The Political Methodologist. His current methods research includes a book project, Spatial Analysis for the Social Sciences (under contract at Cambridge University Press).

Corwin Smidt, Junior PRISM Fellow AY 2004-2005: smidtc@msu.edu

Corwin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University. He studies American politics, including campaigns and elections, the media, political behavior, Parties, Congress, American political development, religion and politics. He is also interested in quantitative methods and computer programming, specifically: dynamic models, real-time data acquisition and analysis, natural language processing and bayesian methods.

Kevin Sweeney, Senior PRISM Fellow AY 2003-2004: ksweeney@jwac.mil

Kevin Sweeney is the Global Assessment Mission Area Lead at the Joint Warfare Analysis Center in Dahlgren, Virginia. In this position he manages several projects, over 60 employees, and nearly $3 million in Research and Development. Prior to taking this position in May 2007 Kevin founded, grew, and lead an analytical team directly supporting the Multi-National Corps Iraq (MNC-I) Commanding General and his staff with cutting edge economic, statistical, geo-spatial, and other quantitative analysis. On two separate trips to Iraq (July to September 2006 and November to December 2006) Kevin liaised with Corps Staff to gather requirements and guidance for the team. Over this time period, and under his guidance, the team grew from 3 to 25 analysts and produced over 100 analytically derived products, some of which were briefed at the highest levels of the Department of Defense and United States Government. Kevin is the author of 10 academic papers on international conflict and cooperation and political methodology, and his work has appeared in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the Journal of Politics, World Politics, International Interactions, and Conflict Management and Peace Science. Kevin is married to the former Ms. Kelly Byrnes and they have two sons, Ryan Patrick (born 17 July 2005) and Timothy Sean (born 2 January 2007).

Brandon Bartels, Junior PRISM Fellow AY 2003-2004: brandon.bartels@stonybrook.edu

Brandon Bartels is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stony Brook University. He received his Ph.D. from Ohio State in June 2006. His research and teaching interests center on American politics, judicial politics, and political methodology. The subjects of Brandon's research include: (1) judicial decision making, the Supreme Court, inter-branch interactions, the development of legal doctrine; (2) public opinion, political psychology, institutional evaluation; and (3) legislative politics, congressional organization and behavior. In political methodology, he is particularly interested in multilevel (hierarchical) modeling, event history (duration) modeling, models for panel and time-series cross-sectional data, Bayesian data analysis, structural equation modeling, and experimental methodology. Brandon teaches undergraduate courses in judicial politics, constitutional law, and methods, and graduate courses in judicial politics and political methodology.