Mackenzie Erickson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science in the fields of Methodology and American Politics. Her work advances research on elite partisanship, bipartisanship, and the evolving role of subparty factions, such as the Freedom Caucus, on the speech and behavior of other members of their party. 

Mackenzie has worked as a research assistant specializing in network inference and time-to-event models. Her own research employs text similarity analysis, network diffusion, machine learning, and automated web scraping. She is currently a Graduate Research Assistant with the Nationwide Enterprise Analytics Office where she works on predictive analytics and model building.