Stats + Stories

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.

Liberty Vittert is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis and on leave from her position at the University of Glasgow as the Mitchell Lecturer. She will be a Visiting Assistant Professor at Harvard University in the Department of Statistics beginning summer of 2019. She is a graduate of MIT as well as Le Cordon Blue Paris and the University of Glasgow. Her current statistical research involves using facial shape analysis to help children with facial deformities. Liberty is a regular TV and Radio contributor to many news organizations including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, PBS, and FNC, as well as having her own TV series on STV (ITV). Her opinion editorials appear in Popular Science, US News, Newsweek, Business Insider, International Business Times, CBS News, The Conversation, and Fox News. As a Royal Statistical Society Ambassador, BBC Expert Woman, and an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute, Liberty is writing a series of popular science books on how to lie with statistics from the viewpoint of multiple professions. She is also an Associate Editor for the Harvard Data Science Review. Liberty is also on the board of USA for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) as well as being on the board for The Hive (a data initiative), one of the Fast Company's top 6 most innovative non-profits.

The U.N. and Statistics | Stats + Stories Episode 86 by The Stats + Stories Team

Dr. Lloyd Edwards is Professor and Chair of Biostatistics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Edwards has an extensive background in collaborating with researchers in a broad range of areas in biomedical research, including cardiovascular disease, cystic fibrosis, cancer, aging, pediatrics, and minority health. His primary area of applied statistical research relates to the analysis of longitudinal data. Specifically, his statistical research includes derivation of techniques for computation of power, control of Type I error, and measuring model fit in linear and generalized linear mixed models.

Megan Price is the executive director of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), and designs strategies and methods for statistical analysis of human rights data for projects in a variety of locations including Guatemala, Colombia, and Syria. She has contributed analyses submitted as evidence in two court cases in Guatemala and has served as the lead statistician and author on three UN reports documenting deaths in Syria

Lance A. Waller, Ph.D. is Rollins Professor and Chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University. He is a member of the National Academy of Science Board on Mathematical Sciences and Analytics and has served on National Academies Committees on applied and theoretical statistics, cancer near nuclear facilities, geographic assessments of exposures to Agent Orange, and standoff explosive technologies.