SMaPP - Student

pablo.barbera@nyu.edu
Personal Site
Pablo Barberá is a PhD student in the Department of Politics at New York University. His research interests encompass the areas of political behavior and electoral institutions, the use of new information and communication technologies in politics, and the electoral consequences of corruption scandals.
Work In Progress:
"Birds of the Same Feather Tweet Together. Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation Using Twitter Data." This article introduces a new method that scales Twitter users along a common ideological dimension based on who they follow.
"One tweet, One Vote? Inequality in the Political Debate on Twitter." (with Gonzalo Rivero, NYU). This working paper analyzes the structure and content of political conversations that take place on Twitter. We find that most of the existing inequalities in public political exchanges are replicated on this micro-blogging platform.

gz402@nyu.edu
Zephyr is a 2nd year master student in General Psychology. She is interested in political psychology and social mobility studies.

saad.gulzar@nyu.edu
Personal Site Follow @saadgulzar
Saad Gulzar is a Ph.D. student of Political Science at New York University. His current research focuses on the political economy of service delivery in Pakistan. Before starting graduate school, Saad was an economist at the International Growth Center - Pakistan of the London School of Economics and University of Oxford. He holds a Masters in Public Administration from Columbia University and a Masters in Public Policy from the National University of Singapore.

eph231@nyu.edu
Personal Site
Erin is a 6th-year Ph.D. student studying social psychology, with a minor in quantitative methods, under the primary guidance of Prof. John Jost. Her research focuses on the influence of cognitive and motivated biases on processing of sociopolitical information. Her dissertation, which is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, addresses the impact of system justification motivation (i.e., the desire to defend and perpetuate the social, political, and economic status quo) on perceptual and cognitive processing of evidence of anthropogenic climate change. Erin is also interested in the causes and consequences of the transmission of political misinformation via social media. Prior to moving to New York, Erin received a bachelor's degree in music, psychology, and liberal arts & management from Indiana University.

kjagel@gmail.com Personal Site
Katie is interested in the effects of interpersonal relationships on policy decisions and structures. After graduation, she plans to research how changes in domestic attitudes affect international companies looking to invest or collaborate in economic, social and political ventures. She has background in Middle-Eastern and North African studies. This semester she is pursuing a project which will measure the change in influence of social media actors on domestic leaders within, and outside of, election times.

fbkeller@nyu.edu
Franziska Barbara Keller is a PhD student at NYU's Department of Politics interested in the ties among political elites and between them and the population. In her dissertation, she infers social networks from publicly available information and uses measures and methods developed in social network analysis to explain regime stability and elite turnover. As part of her research she will conduct a survey to explore the communication networks between Kazakhstani citizens and the government this summer. She holds a combined MA and BA in Political Science and Islamic Studies from the University of Bern, Switzerland, and has studied or worked in China, Kyrgyzstan, Syria, and Dubai.

megan.metzger@nyu.edu
Megan is a PhD student in the Politics Department at NYU. Her research interests include social movements, political violence, public protest, revolution and nationalist politics. Her previous work has focused on Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and she has spent time in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Bosnia, as well as in Spain. Megan holds a Bachelors in Anthropology and International Studies from Macalester College and a Masters in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

lindsay.rankin@nyu.edu
Lindsay is a Ph.D. student in social psychology. She is interested in when and why people accept the status quo and resist change in their society (or when then they will not) from the perspective of system justification theory. Prior to her current studies at New York University, Lindsay received a Bachelors in psychology from Northwestern University.

joanna.sterling@nyu.edu
Personal Site
Joanna received her BA at the University of Pittsburgh in both Psychology and International and Area Studies. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in Social Psychology at New York University. Joanna is interested in studying conceptions of ideology, ideological identification, and inter-party communication. Her other research interests include system justification theory, mass media communication, leader perception, and indirect means of communication.

tcz206@nyu.edu
Personal Site
I am a PhD student in the Politics Department at New York University. I am interested in the political and psychological factors that drive cycles of violence, with a particular focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Drawing on theories from international relations, comparative politics, and political psychology, I use social media, surveys, and field experiments to test extant theories of conflict and develop new ones.
Relevant Paper
Zeitzoff, Thomas. 2011. “Using Social Media to Measure Conflict Dynamics: An Application to the 2008- 2009 Gaza Conflict” Journal of Conflict Resolution. 55(6): 938-969. URL: http://jcr.sagepub.com/content/55/6/938

dbp3@nyu.edu
Ducan designed this website together with Peihong. He thinks science is awesome, and dictates all his code to a parrot he trained to type during his jungle adolescence (this last is not strictly true).

Interests: bioinformatics, self-organizing (multiagent, swarm, autonomic, self-adaptive) systems, cloud computing.

peihong.chai@nyu.edu
Peihong is a master student major in computer science at New York University who is expected to graduate in May, 2013. Peihong serves as a software engineer for SMaPP project. He loves software engineering and decides to devote his career to it. Peihong designed this website together with Duncan.

Peihong is interested in software development, web development and cloud computing. He is developing a new interest in writing simple and elegant code.