Brandon Stewart the Director of the Statistics Core at OPR and Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology. He develops new quantitative statistical methods for applications across the social sciences. Methodologically his focus is in tools which facilitate automated text analysis and model complex heterogeneity in regression. Many recent applications of these methods have centered on using large corpora of text to better understand propaganda in contemporary China. His research has been published in journals such as American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis and the Proceedings of the Association of Computational Linguistics. His work has won the Edward R Chase Dissertation Prize, the Gosnell Prize for Excellence in Political Methodology, and the Political Analysis Editor’s Choice Award.

How Can Statistics Help Us Uncover Hidden Structure in the Actions of Individuals and Organizations?

My research agenda aims to create and distribute new statistical tools for analyzing data across the social sciences. These methods allow us to uncover hidden or latent structure which provides us with the opportunity to examine processes which were either impossible or too costly to study. A recent series of work has used newspaper archives to unpack the contemporary media environment and China and expose some of the methods of propaganda employed by the government there. However these methodological approaches are designed to be used across a variety of contexts and accordingly I have done work in areas including education, human trafficking, forced migration, international relations, constitutional law and psychology.

• Brandon Stewart
  Brandon Stewart Honored for Excellence in Mentoring Graduate Students