Junior and Senior PRISM Scholars
The primary responsibility of the Senior PRISM Scholar is to consult with faculty and advanced graduate students on methods-related issues, and to provide technical assistance and advice. This support may range from assisting with computational issues – data acquisition/formatting and the use of statistics software and programming – to assistance with the graphical presentation of data, including assistance with advanced statistics. The Senior Scholar holds regular office hours where students and faculty may come for assistance. In addition, the Senior Scholar will provide support to students and instructors in methodology courses upon their request, such as by holding computer sessions to assist course participants. The Senior Scholar also helps to coordinate and present PRISM brownbag sessions on both introductory and advanced methods topics.
The primary responsibility of the Junior PRISM Scholar is to consult with first- and second-year graduate students on methods-related issues, and to provide technical assistance and advice. This support may range from assistance with coursework to help with acquiring and analyzing data. The Junior Scholar holds regular office hours where students and faculty may come for assistance. The Junior Scholar will provide support to students and instructors in methodology courses upon their request, such as by holding computer sessions to assist course participants. The Junior Scholar also helps to coordinate and present PRISM brownbag sessions on both introductory and advanced methods topics. Moreover, the Junior Scholar coordinates methods lunches throughout the school year to help foster a dialogue between graduate students and methods faculty on issues ranging from professional development to new methods research and applications.
You may contact the PRISM Scholars for assistance using the following email: ps-prism@lists.osu.edu.
Current PRISM Scholars
Seobin Han, Senior Scholar, is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at the Ohio State University majoring in Comparative Politics and Political Methodology and minoring in Statistics. Her research interests lie in the intersection of political economy and political behavior. She studies how political and economic institutions interact with the public and shape policy preferences over time and across countries. Prior to joining OSU, Seobin received her B.A. in Political Science & History and M.A. in Political Science from Korea University.
Hyunso Christy Oh, Junior Scholar, is a Ph.D. student specializing in International Relations, Political Methodology, and Political Psychology. Her research interests include public opinion, international security, and international organizations. Currently, she is engaged in projects looking into public support for engagement with IOs, public responses to uncertainty in international security issues, among others. Christy received her B.A. with Great Honor from Korea University, majoring in Political Science and International Relations & Economics, and received her M.Sc. from London School of Economics in Comparative Politics. Before joining OSU, Christy served as an Advisor for the Security Council Team at the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Korea to the United Nations, where she covered international and cyber-security, as well as DPRK nuclear issues.
Past PRISM Scholars and Fellows
Seamus Wagner, Senior Scholar: wagner.1470@buckeyemail.osu.edu
Seamus Wagner is a PhD student specializing in comparative politics with an interest in political behavior. He is interested in studying elections and electoral behavior in Sub-Saharan Africa. Seamus graduated from The Pennsylvania State University with BAs in African Studies and International Relations.
Karis Neufeld, Junior Scholar: neufeld.19@buckeyemail.osu.edu
Karis is a Ph.D. candidate studying comparative politics and mixed methods. Her dissertation examines the way state and non-state actors implement asylum policy in Côte d'Ivoire and Zambia. Her broader research agenda explores identity, state-building, and migration from both behavioral and institutional perspectives in Africa. Karis holds a B.S. in International Studies and a B.A. in Economics from Indiana University. She previously worked as a Monitoring and Evaluation Assistant with Mennonite Central Committee in Goré, Chad and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and served as an English teaching assistant in Mende, France.
Abigail Kielty, Senior Scholar: kielty.5@buckeyemail.osu.edu
Abigail is a PhD candidate specializing in American Politics and Political Methodology. Her research focuses on Congressional representation and how legislators engage with their constituents in online spaces. Abigail’s wide-ranging methodological interests include surveys, experiments, interviews, and machine learning (particularly text and social media analysis). She earned her M.A. from Ohio State in 2020 and holds a B.A. in Political Science and History from the University of Missouri.
Liuya Zhang, Junior Scholar: zhang.11580@buckeyemail.osu.edu
Liuya is a Ph.D. candidate in political science (international relations and political methodology) at Ohio State University. She is interested in soft power, media discourse, and international relations in Asia-Pacific. Her methodological interests include text analysis, causal inference, GIS, and remote sensing. She earned her B.A. from Fudan University, majoring in Korean Language and Literature, and Master of Area Studies (East Asia) from Seoul National University, and Master of International Affairs from UC San Diego.
Caleb Leininger, Junior Scholar: leininger.75@buckeyemail.osu.edu
Jared Edgerton, Senior Fellow: edgerton.37@buckeyemail.osu.edu
Jared Edgerton is a PhD political science student with concentrations in international relations and political methodology. Jared’s research focuses on political violence, international conflict, and complex system modeling. His current projects include studying the effect of unexploded ordnances on post-conflict development, the motivations of suicide terrorists, the effect of exogenous shocks on different social network structures, the co-appearance networks of pundits from 2000 to 2010, and the differences between single and repeat offenders during the Rwanda Genocide. Jared's methodological research interests include network inference, machine learning, and complex system modeling. During the summer of 2018, Jared attended the Santa Fe Institute Complex Systems Summer School. Before coming to OSU, Jared was a Fulbright Fellow in the Republic of Georgia and researched human and drug trafficking for the social science research firm Abt Associates. In his spare time, Jared likes to hike, travel, and kayak. Personal website where links to the aforementioned can be found at jaredfedgerton.net
Laura Moses, Junior Fellow (2019-2020); Senior Fellow (2021-2022): moses.96@osu.edu
Laura’s research focuses on the link between elite and mass political behavior through communication processes and uses computational methods. Her work incorporates research on interest groups, Congress, and public opinion utilizes unstructured data and social media data. She also develops computational social science tools, focusing on network modeling, machine learning, and natural language processing. Before coming to OSU, Laura received an MPA from Brown University. You can find her CV on her website: https://lmmoses.github.io/
Elias Assaf, Senior Fellow: assaf.20@buckeyemail.osu.edu
Elias Assaf is a PhD student in Political Science with a major in International Relations and a minor in Political Psychology. His research focuses on the psychological processes that shape group and individual-level perceptions and influence foreign policy decisions. He is specifically interested in the flow of information in networks and its effect on belief formation, perception accuracy, and behavior. Elias employs experimental designs, network analyses, automated content analysis, and time series methodologies in his research, and is a member of The Network Interdependence in Social Systems (NISS) Lab at Ohio State. He is a Minority Fellow of The American Political Science Association (2014-2015), and a graduate of The University of Central Florida (B.A., M.A., 2014), where he was awarded the Pollock-Ellsworth Award for Best Master's Level Thesis in Political Science for advanced quantitative methodology. He has presented work at The Southern Political Science Association, The Florida Political Science Association, and Political Networks.
Daniel Kent, Junior Fellow: kent.249@buckeyemail.osu.edu
Daniel Kent is a Ph.D. student in Political Science, specializing in International Relations and Political Methodology. Substantively, his research focuses on conflict processes and the elasticity of foreign policy beliefs. Methodologically, he is interested in network science, Bayesian statistics, and techniques for detecting and modeling time-varying effects. Prior to OSU, Daniel earned a B.A. in International Relations at the University of California, Davis.
Aisha Bradshaw, Senior Fellow AY 2016-17: bradshaw.115@osu.edu
Adam Lauretig, Junior Fellow AY 2016-17: lauretig.1@buckeyemail.osu.edu
Adam is a PhD student specializing in political methodology and international relations. He is interested in spatial statistics, causal inferences, and Bayesian analysis. In particular, he is interested in how spatial dependency structures affect casual inference techniques, such as matching and weighting. Substantively, he is interested in the quantitative study of conflict through the use of event data.
Will Massengill, Senior Fellow AY 2015-16: massengill.8@osu.edu
Will Massengill is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science, majoring in American Politics and minoring in Political Methodology. Broadly, his substantive research interests cover special interest politics, the policy process, and federalism. Methodologically, he is most interested in causal inference, longitudinal data analysis, multilevel modeling, and game theory. He received his B.A. in Political Science from Clemson University and his M.A. from Ohio State in 2014.
Drew Rosenberg, Junior Fellow AY 2015-16
Megan Eisenman, Senior Fellow AY 2014-15: eisenman.21@osu.edu
Megan Eisenman is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at The Ohio State University with a focus in comparative politics and methodology. Her research focuses on the impact that oil can have on distributional politics, both in the United States and abroad, and on the evolution of the “resource curse” over time. As a Harrison Scholar, she earned her B.A. in International Studies and German at Miami University. She earned her M.A. in political science from The Ohio State University in 2012 where she is serving as the Senior PRISM (Program in Statistics and Methodology) Fellow (2014-2015).
Caitlin Clary, Junior Fellow AY 2014-15: clary.69@osu.edu
Caitlin Clary is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science with a focus in international relations and political methodology. Her research centers on the causes and consequences of regime complexity, and particularly on how the involvement of multiple international organizations in security provision efforts impacts the effectiveness of those efforts. Her methodological interests include network analysis, causal inference, and Bayesian statistics. Caitlin earned her B.S. in political science from the University of West Georgia and her M.A. in political science from The Ohio State University in 2014.
Raphael Cunha, Senior Fellow AY 2013-2014: cunha.6@osu.edu
Raphael Cunha is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science, majoring in International Relations and minoring in Political Methodology. He has broad research interests in international and comparative political economy, with a particular focus on the politics of international finance and sovereign credit risk, as well as the design of international financial and trade institutions. His methodological interests include research design, causal inference, and methods for the study of complex interdependencies in the global political economy, such as spatial econometrics and social network analysis. Raphael received his B.A. and M.Sc. in International Relations from the University of Brasília, Brazil, and his M.A. in Political Science from Ohio State University.
Kristine Kay, Junior Fellow AY 2013-2014: kay.108@osu.edu
Kris is a third year in the Political Science Ph.D. program, majoring in American Politics and minoring in Political Methodology. She studies race politics and political psychology, with an emphasis on Latino public opinion. She is particularly interested in the effects of different contexts on racial and ethnic identity and in turn on political attitudes. Her methodological interests include multilevel modeling, event history, causal inference and experimental methods.
Eleonora Mattiacci, Senior Fellow AY 2012-2013: mattiacci.1@buckeyemail.osu.edu
Eleonora Mattiacci is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science. Her primary research interests are in International Relations and Political Methodology, with a particular focus on international conflict recurrence, crisis management and intervention and nuclear proliferation. She explores these substantive interests by focusing methodologically on how to model uncertainty, time and recurrence, and through integrating both qualitative and quantitative tools. Her dissertation proposes a theory of instances of volatility in international relations, that is, those cases when relations between states are characterized by rapid shifts between cooperation and conflict.
Agnar Helgason, Junior Fellow AY 2012-2013: helgason.2@osu.edu
Agnar F. Helgason is a Ph.D. student in Political Science, majoring in Comparative Politics and minoring in Political Methodology. He received his B.Sc. in Economics and Diploma in International Affairs from the University of Iceland and his M.Sc. in Comparative Politics, with an emphasis on comparative political economy, from the London School of Economics. Agnar completed his M.Sc. at the LSE with distinction and was awarded the Bill Letwin Prize for the best performance in the program. He has broad interests in comparative and international political economy, with special interests in the politics of redistribution and taxation. Agnar's methodological interests include causal inference, multilevel modeling and temporal methods.
Ben Jones, Senior Fellow AY 2011-2012: jones.2781@osu.edu
Ben Jones is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science. He received his B.A. from Colgate University in Hamilton, NY and his M.A. in Political Science from The Ohio State University. His substantive research interests include the onset of civil wars, civil war recurrence, the role of military interventions in civil war processes, peacekeeping and conflict mediation. His methodological interests are varied, and include survival analysis, with a particular focus on event recurrence, and models that incorporate causal complexity. His dissertation combines these interests by reconceptualizing civil wars as a dynamic process, modeling the onset, termination and recurrence of conflict in a dynamic fashion.
Matt Hitt, Junior Fellow AY 2011-2012: hitt.23@osu.edu
Matt Hitt is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science. He received his B.A. from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. His substantive research focuses on judicial politics, particularly the U.S. Supreme Court, social choice theory, and legislative politics. Methodologically, Matt's research interests include network analysis, multilevel modeling and causal inference. He is particularly interested in how institutions change over time, and how institutional change impacts the substantive output of political bodies. He plans to integrate his substantive and methodological interests in his dissertation addressing those questions.
Eleonora Mattiacci, Senior Fellow AY2010-2011: mattiacci.1@osu.edu
Eleonora Mattiacci is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science. She received her B.A and M.A. in International Relations from the University of Bologna, Italy, and her M.A. in Political Science from Ohio State. She is interested in researching the causal mechanisms that determine the variance of a social phenomenon, and she has been working on the determinants of the variance in crisis recurrence. Her dissertation proposes a theory of turbulence between international rivals. She translates her substantive interests in the methodology field by studying volatility in Time Series.
Jason Morgan, Junior Fellow AY 2010-11: morgan.746@osu.edu
Jason Morgan is a Ph.D. candidate in political science. He received his B.A. in economics and German studies from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR and his M.A. in political science from Boston College. His substantive research interests include the politics of state consolidation and institutional decentralization in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe. His methodological interests include causal inference, nonparametric techniques, multilevel modeling, and time series. He hopes to use his time as junior PRISM fellow to explore how measurement theory can contribute to the social sciences.
Daniel Blake, Senior Fellow AY 2009-2010: blake.165@polisci.osu.edu
Daniel Blake received his Ph.D. in 2010 and is currently a fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University. His research interests include the politics of trade and FDI, business-government relations, institutions, and quantitative methods. His current research focuses on the design and effects of international investment agreements and the politics of FDI for firms based in developing and emerging market economies. In September 2011, Daniel will join the Strategy Department at the IE Business School in Madrid, Spain as an Assistant Professor.
Benjamin Jones, Junior Fellow AY 2009-2010: jones.2781@polisci.osu.edu
Benjamin Jones is a Ph.D. candidate in International Relations. He received his B.A. from Colgate University in Hamilton, NY and his Master in Political Science from Ohio State. His substantive research interests include the onset of civil wars, civil war recurrence, the role of military interventions in civil wars, peacekeeping, conflict mediation. His methodological interests are varied, but he hopes to use his time as Senior Fellow to further his skills in survival analysis and time series methods. His dissertation combines these interests by reconceptualizing civil wars as a dynamic process, modeling onset, termination and recurrence simultaneously.
Byungwon Woo, Senior Fellow AY 2008-2009: 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 methodological interests are eclectic; among others, he is particularly interested in event history analysis and EITM - empirical implications of theoretical models. After graduating from OSU in 2010, Byungwon joined the Political Science department at Oakland University in Michigan as an assistant professor.
Yoon-Ah Oh, Junior Fellow AY 2008-2009: 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.
Dino Christenson, Senior PRISM Fellow AY 2007-2008: dinopc@bu.edu
Dino P. Christenson received his Ph. D. in 2010 and he is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Boston University. His research focuses on voting behavior, campaign dynamics, political sophistication, public opinion and interest groups. He has broad methodological interests, including survey and experimental research, longitudinal data models, Bayesian models, social network analysis, automated text analysis and causal inference. His work has been published in Political Behavior, The Political Methodologist, Journal of Political Marketing and edited volumes.
Scott Powell, Junior PRISM Fellow AY 2007-2008: powell.413@polisci.osu.edu
Scott Powell received his Ph.D. in 2011, 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. In 2011, Scott received an NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant. In 2012, Scott will join the Political Science Department at the University of Tennessee as an assistant professor.
Anand Sokhey, Senior PRISM Fellow AY 2006-2007: Anand.Sokhey@Colorado.edu
Anand Sokhey received his Ph.D. in 2009 and he joined the faculty at the University of Colorado at Boulder as an assistant professor. Anand specializes in American politics, and his work examines the role that social influence plays in voting behavior, political participation, and opinion formation, with a special focus on how people employ their networks when acquiring and processing information. Anand is currently working on a series of papers concerning spatial and contextual patterns of political participation in the 2008 elections, and several experiments relating interpersonal networks to the quality of individual political decision-making. His research has been published in Politics and Religion, American Political Science Review, American Politics Research, PS: Political Science and Politics, American Journal of Political Science, Social Science Quarterly.
Quintin Beazer, Junior PRISM Fellow AY 2006-2007: beazer.1@osu.edu
Quintin H. Beazer received his Ph.D. in 2011 studying Comparative Politics and Political Economy at The Ohio State University. His substantive interests involve economic and institutional reform in Russia and other post-communist countries. Quintin’s current projects include a dissertation on private investment across Russia’s regions, a co-authored paper on the interactive effect of budgetary constraints and regime type on government spending, and an investigation into the effects of IMF program conditions on economic reform outcomes in the post-communist countries. After serving as PRISM Junior Fellow, Quintin has continued to explore further his methodological interests by studying spatial econometrics and Bayesian statistics, as well as completing a Masters in Economics. In 2011, Quintin will join the Political Science Department at Yale as a Post-Doctoral Fellow.
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 was 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 substantive research interests in political behavior, political geography, and American political development and methodological interests in spatial analysis, survival analysis and time series analysis. Much of his substantive research focuses on elite-mass interactions and how these interactions shape opinion formation, political participation, and citizen competence. His research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Political Geography, Political Research Quarterly, Political Behavior, Political Psychology, American Politics Research, and The Political Methodologist. His current methods research includes a book project, Spatial Analysis for the Social Sciences (under contract for the Analytical Methods for Social Research series 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. He received his Ph.D. from Ohio State in 2008.
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 George Washington 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.