2012 VIM Participant Bios

Lee Ann Banaszak

  • Professor in Political Science and affiliate faculty member in the Department of Women’s Studies at Penn State. Has published extensively on social movements and on gender and politics. Her most recent book, The Women’s Movement Inside and Outside the State, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010.
  • Website: http://polisci.la.psu.edu/facultybios/banaszak.html

Robin Best

Kanisha Bond

Jan Box-Steffensmeier

  • Vernal Riffe Chair of Political Science at Ohio State University, and has a courtesy appointment in the Department of Sociology. Director of PRISM (Political Research In Statistics and Methodology), President of the Midwest Political Science Association (2010-2012), Inaugural Fellow of the Society for Political Methodology (2008), and editorial board member for Political Analysis. She has published articles in the APSR, AJPS, JOP, Political Analysis, etc., and is the author of Event History Modeling: A Guide for Social Scientists, published by Cambridge University Press. A new book, Time Series for Social Scientists, is under contract at Cambridge University Press.
  • Website: http://polisci.osu.edu/faculty/jbox/index.htm

Courtenay Conrad

Simone Dietrich

Michelle Dion

  • Associate Professor at McMaster. Works on social policy, including public education, health, and welfare policy,with an emphasis on the ways in which economic and political processes produce different social policy outcomes in the developing world, particularly in Latin America. Her recent book, Workers and Welfare: Comparative Institutional Change in Twentieth Century Mexico, was published in 2010 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She is one of the primary developers of OPOSSEM (the Online Portal of Social Science Education in Methodology), an online portal to facilitate sharing of various resources for teaching social science research methods (particularly statistical methods) among educators in secondary, undergraduate, and postgraduate settings.
  • Website: http://michelledion.com/

Sona N. Golder

Georgia Kernell

  • Assistant professor at Northwestern since 2009; held post-doc at U Penn prior to that. Teaches graduate-level quantitative methods courses at Northwestern and publishes in Political Analysis. Substantive interest can be broadly described as political representation, or specifically related to political candidates (both at the level of party nomination procedures and at the level of voters choosing between candidates/parties).
  • Website: http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/gkernell/
  • Paper: Strategic Party Heterogeneity

Jenn Larson

Suzie Linn

  • Professor at Penn State. Editorial board member for Political Analysis (associate editor 2003-2007). She has published extensively on time series and event history models, among other methodology topics. She founded the Quantitative Social Science Initiative (QuaSSI) at Penn State in 2004 (originally called the Social Science Statistics Partnership). Her book on The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence (Cambridge, 2008) won the 2008 Gladys Kammerer Award from the American Political Science Association for the best book on US national policy.
  • Website: http://www.personal.psu.edu/sld8/

Sara Mitchell

Ellie Powell

Maya Sen

Heather Stoll

Burcu Savun

  • Assistant professor at Pittsburgh since 2005. Publishes in AJPS, JOP, JCR, IO, etc.. Substantive work focuses on the resolution of civil wars and the durability of peace after wars, as well as on the role of foreign aid in civil conflict.
  • Website: http://www.pitt.edu/~burcu/
  • Paper: Elections and Civil War

Jakana Thomas

Caroline Tolbert

  • Professor at University of Iowa. Her research explores political behavior, elections, and representation widely defined (specifically, voting, elections and representation, public opinion, American state politics, direct democracy, race/ethnicity, digital politics and information technology) and is published in JOP, AJPS, PRQ, etc.. Her most recent book, Why Iowa? How Caucuses and Sequential Elections Improve the Presidential Nominating Process, was published in 2011 by the University of Chicago Press. She was chair of the first diversity committee for the Society of Political Methodology.
  • Website: http://clas.uiowa.edu/polisci/people/caroline-j-tolbert

Vera Troeger

  • Professor of Quantitative Political Science, Departments of Economics and Political Science, University of Warwick. She is currently one of the associate editors of Political Analysis, a executive committee member of the newly founded European Political Science Association, and was Director of the Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis for 4 years. Her research interests lie at the intersection of international and comparative political economy, econometrics, and applied statistics, in particular economic policy diffusion and spillovers of monetary and tax policy, quantitative political methodology, especially pooled cross-section time series analysis, the trade off between bias and efficiency in finite sample econometrics and endogeneity issues. Her work has appeared in AJPS, BJPS, JCR, and Political Analysis, among others.
  • Website: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/academic/troeger/

Susan Welch

  • Professor of Political Science at Penn State and the Susan Welch Dean of the College of the Liberal Arts. Her research is in American politics, particularly urban, ethnic, and women’s politics. She is the author of nearly 150 scholarly articles and six books, two textbooks (including an American government textbook now in its eleventh edition), and three edited collections. She was recently named as one of the most cited political scientists of her generation. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Mental Health, and the National Institute of Justice. She is also a member of the UIUC Alumni Hall of Fame.
  • Website: http://www.la.psu.edu/about/administrative-directory/sxw11