Biography

I’m an assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University. My projects include new techniques for extracting political events from text, automatically learning events from text, resolving place names in text to their geographic coordinates, linking events with the locations where they occur, generating event data from Arabic text, creating novel datasets to understand the determinants of violence against civilians in Syria, and methods for quantifying uncertainty in the study of military operations.

I received my PhD in political science from MIT, with a dissertation that develops new techniques in natural language processing to better understand international conflict and civil war. I spent a year at NYU’s Center for Data Science before starting at MSU.

Before graduate school, I worked in Washington, DC, developing open source analysis software for DARPA. After graduating from Amherst College, I spent a year in Kosovo on a Fulbright fellowship. I’ve consulted as a data scientist/engineer for the Political Instability Task Force,, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Kensho Technologies, a number of university research projects, and a sports betting operation.