dac guests for 2024

List of Guest Speakers at the Data Analytics Colloquium (2024)

Pablo M. Pinto

Dr. Pablo M. Pinto is a Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Public Policy at the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs. Pinto’s areas of expertise are international and comparative political economy, comparative politics, and quantitative methods. Pinto served as UH Energy Faculty Fellow, non-resident Scholar in the Latin America Initiative of the Baker Institute at Rice University, and co-editor of the journal Economics & Politics. He holds an M.A. from Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan, and a Ph.D. in Political Science and International Affairs from the University of California, San Diego. He received a Law Degree from Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina. Prior to joining the University of Houston in 2014, Pinto was a member of the faculty of Columbia University. He taught at the Escuela Nacional de Gobierno in his native Argentina, and the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, where he founded and directed the Department for Asia-Pacific Studies. He also worked as Chief Counsel for Toyota Argentina.

Jared Edgerton

Dr. Jared Edgerton's research explores international security and subnational conflict through the lens of complex systems modeling. In much of my work, I focus on how networked relations, group identity, and polarization drive conflict dynamics. I am particularly interested in three areas: participation in political violence, group identity’s role in conflict processes, and the influence of networked relations on domestic and international conflict. In this work, I use complex modeling strategies, including machine learning, natural language processing, and network analysis.

Guy whitten

Guy D. Whitten is a Professor and the Department Head for Political Science in the Bush School of Public Policy & Public Service at Texas A&M University. He holds the Bob Bullock Chair in Public Policy and Finance. Dr. Whitten’s primary research and teaching interests are comparative public policy, political economy, and political methodology. Much of his published research has involved cross-national comparative studies of the influence of economics on government popularity and elections. More recently, his work has focused on political budgeting, including a book titled The Politics of Budgets: Getting a Piece of the Pie, written with Christine Lipsmeyer and Andrew Philips, published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. Dr. Whitten has published a number of influential works on the use of statistics to make inferences in the social sciences. Together with Paul Kellstedt, he has written a text- book titled The Fundamentals of Political Science Research (Cambridge University Press 2009, 2013, 2018; Portuguese version published by Blucher 2015). He is a co-editor of the Cambridge University Press book series Methodological Tools in the Social Sciences and cur- rently serves on the editorial boards of Political Analysis and Political Science and Research Methods. Dr. Whitten is a frequent instructor of short courses on statistical methods for social scientists at a number of international universities and research centers. These include the International Political Science Association’s Summer Schools on Concepts, Methods and Techniques in Political Science (in Mexico City, S˜ao Paulo, and Singapore) and the Workshops on Social Science Research (in Montreal). His methodological specialties include models of compositional and discrete dependent variables and models of spatial and/or temporal dynamic processes.

R. Michael Alvarez

R. Michael Alvarez is the Flintridge Foundation Professor of Political and Computational Social Science at Caltech, and Co-Director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project. At Caltech, he is a faculty member in the Social Sciences, and an associated faculty member in the Social and Decision Neuroscience program. Recently he became the founding Co-Director of Caltech’s Center for Science, Society, and Public Policy. He is also a Fellow of the Society for Political Methodology, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Alvarz has been recognized for my mentoring work, both at Caltech by the Graduate Student Council (twice) and by the Society for Political Methodology. He is the faculty liaison to Caltech’s men’s basketball program and is active in the community, working mainly with educational institutions and other non-profits.

Jacob Morrier

Jacob Morrier is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in Social Science at the California Institute of Technology, specializing in advanced quantitative methods such as causal inference, econometrics, and machine learning. He applies these tools to analyze administrative, behavioral, and text data relevant to substantive questions in political economy and political science. His research has been published or is forthcoming in leading journals, including the Journal of Politics, Political Science Research and Methods, and Political Research Quarterly. He holds an M.Sc. from Caltech, a B.Sc. in Economics from Université du Québec à Montréal, and a Bachelor’s in Financial Economics and Engineering from Université Paris-Dauphine.