Stats + Stories

Richard Harris has covered science, medicine and the environment for National Public Radio since 1986. He has traveled the world, from the South Pole and the Great Barrier Reef to the Arctic Ocean, reporting on climate change. The American Geophysical Union honored him with a Presidential Citation for Science and Society. In 2014, he turned his attention back to biomedical research and came to realize how the field was suffering. Too many scientists were chasing too little funding. That led him to take a year-long sabbatical at Arizona State University’s Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes to research and write Rigor Mortis.

Dr. Steven Lloyd Wilson is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016, and serves as the Project Manager of Computational Infrastructure for the Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of Gothenburg. His research focuses on comparative democratization, cyber-security, and the effect of the Internet on authoritarian regimes. He also works on a variety of projects involving network and content analysis of social media around the world.

Dr. Sara Cobb has a Ph.D. in Communication (UMASS Amherst) and is the Drucie French Cumbie Chair at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (S-CAR) at George Mason University, where she was, from 2001-2009, the dean/director. In her current role as faculty she teaches and conducts research on the relationship between narrative and conflict. She is also the Director of the Center for the Study of Narrative and Conflict Resolution at S-CAR, which provides a hub for scholarship on narrative approaches to conflict analysis and resolution. She is co-editor of the journal Narrative and Conflict: Explorations in Theory and Practice

Karen Bandeen-Roche, PhD is a statistician / gerontologist who currently chairs the Department of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her statistical specialty areas of research are in latent variable and multivariate outcome modeling. Her gerontologic research aims to better understand the causes and course of physical disability, cognitive decline, and frailty in older adults, so that their adverse implications can be delayed or avoided. She is an ASA Fellow and a Marvin Zelen Leadership in Statistical Science Award winner, and she has contributed extensive service to promote the statistical profession through leadership in scientific review panels and our professional societies.

We Apologize for Technical Difficulties Nicole Lazar is Professor of Statistics at the University of Georgia. After receiving her BA in Statistics and Psychology from Tel Aviv University, she served three years as Statistics Officer in the Israel Defense Forces Department of Behavioral Sciences. She then moved to the US for graduate school, obtaining her MS in Statistics from Stanford University and Ph.D. in Statistics from The University of Chicago. She was Associate Professor of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University before joining the Department of Statistics, University of Georgia.

Arturas Rozenas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at New York University. He was a National Fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford. His research focuses on building theoretical models of authoritarian politics and testing them using natural experiments, field experiments, and machine learning tools. At NYU, he teaches courses on comparative politics and advanced statistical methods.

Dr. Alicia Carriquiry is a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a Professor of Statistics at Iowa State University. She serves as Director and lead investigator for the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence. The NIST Center of Excellence’s mission is to increase the scientific rigor of forensic science through improved statistical applications. Dr. Carriquiry provides scientific oversight and research expertise to the center. She participates in the Organization of Scientific Area Committees subcommittee on Materials and Trace Evidence and serves as a technical advisor for the Association of Firearms and Tool Mark Examiners. Dr. Carriquiry was recently named to the National Academy of Medicine and elected as a fellow to the American Associations for the Advancement of Science.

Megan Metzger is a Research Scholar and Associate Director for Research at the Global Digital Policy Incubator (GDPi) Program at Stanford University. Before coming to Stanford, she completed a PhD in Politics at NYU as a member of the Social Media and Political Participation Lab and was a Postdoctoral scholar in Russian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Megan’s research is focused on how changes in technology change how individuals and states use and have access to information, and how this affects political behavior. Her current research is primarily focused on the role of RT as a component of Russian state strategies online.

Dr. Sara Cobb has a Ph.D. in Communication (UMASS Amherst) and is the Drucie French Cumbie Chair at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (S-CAR) at George Mason University, where she was, from 2001-2009, the dean/director. In her current role as faculty she teaches and conducts research on the relationship between narrative and conflict. She is also the Director of the Center for the Study of Narrative and Conflict Resolution at S-CAR, which provides a hub for scholarship on narrative approaches to conflict analysis and resolution. She is co-editor of the journal Narrative and Conflict: Explorations in Theory and Practice.

Joshua A. Tucker is Professor of Politics, affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, and affiliated Professor of Data Science at New York University. He is the Director of NYU’s Jordan Center for Advanced Study of Russia, a co-Director of the NYU Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) laboratory, and a co-author/editor of the award-winning politics and policy blog The Monkey Cage at The Washington Post. He serves on the advisory board of the American National Election Study, the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, and numerous academic journals, and was the co-founder and co-editor of the Journal of Experimental Political Science. His original research was on mass political behavior in post-communist countries, including voting and elections, partisanship, public opinion formation, and protest participation. In 2006, he was awarded the Emerging Scholar Award for the top scholar in the field of Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior within 10 years of the doctorate. More recently, he has been at the forefront of the newly emerging field of study of the relationship between social media and politics. His research in this area has included studies on the effects of network diversity on tolerance, partisan echo chambers, online hate speech, the effects of exposure to social media on political knowledge, online networks and protest, disinformation and fake news, how authoritarian regimes respond to online opposition, and Russian bots and trolls. His research has appeared in over two-dozen scholarly journals, and his most recent book is the co-authored Communism’s Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes (Princeton University Press, 2017). Professor Tucker’s research on social media and politics has been supported by over $2.8 million in grants and gifts in the past 18 months from five philanthropic foundations and the National Science Foundation. Follow him @j_a_tucker.