PRISM Fellows

The Program in Statistics and Methodology supports two PRISM fellows each academic year. The applications for the Junior and Senior PRISM fellows can be downloaded here: (junior.doc) (junior.pdf) (senior.doc) (senior.pdf). For the AY 2011-2012, the fellows are:

Ben Jones, Senior Fellow: 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: 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.

Past PRISM Fellows

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 is a Ph.D. student in Political Science, 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 in 2011 a NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant. In 2012, Scott will join the Political Science Department at the University of Tennesse 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 is a Ph.D. candidate studying Comparative Politics and Political Economy at The Ohio State University.  His substantive interests involve economic and institutional reform in Russia and other postcommunist countries. Quintin’s current projects include a dissertation on private investment across Russia’s regions, a coauthored 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 postcommunist 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 is 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.