Director

Burt Monroe is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Penn State. His research is in comparative politics, examining the impact of electoral and legislative institutions on political behavior and outcomes, and social science methodology, examining the development and application of Bayesian methods, statistical learning, and statistical graphics to social science problems. He is currently director of a multidisciplinary NSF-funded project with political scientists, computational linguists, and statisticians on The Dynamics of Political Rhetoric and Political Representation, developing methods for the statistical analysis of political speech. This team was awarded the 2006 Gosnell Prize for Excellence in Political Methodology.

Predoctoral Fellows

Past Directors

Suzanna De Boef: 2004-2006
SDeBoef@psu.edu

Suzanna De Boef is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Penn State. Her research focuses on longitudinal data analysis, especially methods for time series analysis and duration models, and American political behavior with a focus on economic attitudes and voting over time. Her work is supported by the National Science Foundation and has received the Gosnell Prize for Excellence in Political Methodology. She served as the founding director of QuaSSI.

Past Postdoctoral Fellows

Jee-Kwang Park has a BA and MA in political science from Seoul National University and earned his Ph.D in Political Science from Columbia in 2005. In 2005-2006, he served as a post-doctoral research associate at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. His research focuses on time series applications to political science.

Past Predoctoral Fellows

Tatiana Vashchilko has a master's degree in Economics and is currently a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Penn State. She serves as a research assistant for the Regional Economic Institutions as a Security Institutions NSF project. Her research interests include institutional design, foreign direct investments (FDI), international political economy, political methodology and formal modeling. Her methodological interests include spatial times series, choice models, and models of dyadic data.

Corey Sparks: Fall 2006
css186@psu.edu

Corey Sparks is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology and Demography at Penn State, doing research in fertility, mortality and migration in preindustrial populations. His current work focuses on the influences of family dynamics on fertility decision making and infant mortality in the islands of Orkney, Scotland. His methodological interests are in survival analysis, multivariate statistics, matrix simulation modeling and spatial statistics.

Heather Ondercin: 2005-2006
hlo114@psu.edu

Heather Ondercin is a doctoral candidate in Political Science and Women Studies at Penn State. Her research interests are focused on American political behavior and methods dealing with time and space. She is currently working on her dissertation on the gender gap in partisanship between 1953 and 2003. In her dissertation she argues that the gender gap in partisanship is a function of changes in aggregate social identity or the meaning of being a man or a woman in society..

Hock-Peng Sin: 2005-2006
hpsin6@psu.edu

Hock-Peng Sin is currently a doctoral candidate in Industrial and Organizational Psychology at Penn State. His research interests include performance appraisal and management as well as interpersonal dynamics in the workplace. His work appears or is forthcoming in outlets such as the Strategic Management Journal, the Personnel Psychology, and the Journal of Organizational Behavior. In addition, he co-authored three book chapters and has presented several papers at major national conferences. He is also the recipient of two Best Student Paper awards at the Academy of Management meeting, one in 2004 from the Human Resource Division and the other in 2005 from the Research Methods Division.

Kyle A. Joyce: 2004-2005, Spring 2007
kjoyce@psu.edu

Kyle Joyce is currently a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Penn State. His research interests include international conflict, war expansion, quantiative political methodology and formal and computational modeling. His methodological interests include survival analysis.

Jacob Hibel: 2004-2005
jrh361@psu.edu

Jacob Hibel is a doctoral candidate in Sociology and Demography at Penn State, doing research in the sociology of education, institutional/organizational school effects, immigration and inequality, family influences on child development, and biosocial perspectives on childhood inequality. His methodological interests include multilevel modeling, quasi-experimental/propensity score approaches to causal analysis, missing data, and daily diary data collection methods.