New Faces in Political Science: Meet Our New Predoctoral Fellows

The Institution for Social and Policy Studies welcomes its new class of political science predoctoral fellows.

Nine scholars have joined this two-year program run in partnership with ISPS’s Center for the Study of American Politics (CSAP) and the Tobin Center for Economic Policy. They are working as full-time research assistants for one or more ISPS faculty mentors while taking for credit or auditing one course per semester, participating in weekly professional development seminars, and attending political science and economics research seminars.

ISPS’s first class of predoctoral fellows were accepted into some of the nation’s best graduate programs. Danielle Hogan and Sydney White are studying political science at Columbia University. John Cho is attending Stanford Graduate School of Business and Stanford Law School. And Ja’nae Jackson and Amelia Malpas are earning degrees at Harvard University’s Department of Government.

“In just two years, this program has demonstrated success in preparing students for graduate work in political science while supporting faculty research,” said CSAP Director and Forst Family Professor of Political Science Gregory Huber. “We are tremendously proud of our inaugural class and thrilled to welcome the newest group of students to our research community.”

ISPS Director and Sterling Professor of Political Science Alan Gerber echoed the praise.

“Our faculty members are excited to work with these talented students,” Gerber said. “This wonderful program serves the dual purpose of training students in preparation of a doctoral program while accelerating avenues of research pursued by our interdisciplinary community of scholars.”

The ISPS-Tobin 2024-26 predoctoral fellows:

Matt Blyth is working with CSAP Director and Forst Family Professor of Political Science Gregory Huber, ISPS Director and Sterling Professor of Political Science Alan Gerber, and ISPS faculty fellow Alexander Coppock. He received a B.A. in physics and a B.S. in political science from the University of Rochester. His research interests include political behavior, vote choice, and democratic backsliding.

Chris Engh is working with ISPS faculty fellows P. M. Aronow and Joshua Kalla on deep generative modeling and its ramifications for liberal democracy. Prior to joining ISPS and CSAP, he studied probability theory and wrote his master’s thesis on the implications of choice frictions in adversely selected markets. His interests lie in input/output, law and economics, causal inference, and high-dimensional statistics.

Niklas Haehn is working for ISPS faculty fellows Joshua Kalla and Shiro Kuriwaki. Previously, he worked as managing editor for the journal European Union Politics and as a research assistant at New York University. He completed the MSc in political economy at the University of Konstanz and earned a B.A. in political science with a specialization in comparative politics and quantitative methods from the University of Mannheim. His research interests include computational social science, intraparty competition, and political behavior.

Justice Harasha is working with ISPS faculty fellow and Damon Wells Professor of Political Science Adam Meirowitz and ISPS Director and Sterling Professor of Political Science Alan Gerber. He earned B.A. degrees in mathematics and economics at Yale. His research interests include economic theory — particularly in mechanism design in settings without monetary transfers — game theoretic approaches to problems in political economy, and information design.

Zoe Kava is working with ISPS faculty fellow Kevin DeLuca on newspaper endorsements and the decline of local newspapers. Zoe graduated from Tufts University with a B.A in political science and community health. Her current research interests include the decline of local news and its impact on political polarization, trends in political journalism, as well as new forms of news media.

Lucas Kreuzer is working with ISPS faculty fellow and Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, John Gross Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a B.A. from Kenyon College and an M.A. from Georgetown University. His research lies at the intersection of comparative political economy and geography with a current focus on the American political economy. He employs mixed-methods research and geospatial analysis to study how historic economic transformations impact place and the socioeconomic realities, identities, and voting behavior of the people that inhabit them.

Juliana Mothersbaugh is assisting ISPS faculty fellow Allison Harris in her work on institutional dynamics and social inequality in the American criminal legal system. Originally from Washington state, Juliana graduated from the University of Chicago magna cum laude with a B.A. in public policy studies and minors in quantitative social analysis and Spanish. She is broadly interested in the empirical study of the practice and politics of law. Most recently, Juliana has focused on mapping interactions with the American civil and criminal legal systems to explore how these interactions can facilitate inequality, particularly among language minorities.

Adriana Maria Quaranta is working with ISPS faculty fellow and Dean Acheson Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs Kenneth Scheve, focusing on markets and democracy using computational methods. Adriana earned her MSc in sociology at the University of Oxford, with a focus on population dynamics and demographic modeling techniques. She has conducted research in governmental settings, including New South Wales in Australia and New York City. Before pursuing graduate studies, Adriana earned a BSc in economics from Bocconi University while also completing a BMus in piano performance with a specialization in historical studies.

Jack Walker is a working with CSAP Director and Forst Family Professor of Political Science Gregory Huber and ISPS Director and Sterling Professor of Political Science Alan Gerber. He earned his B.A. in political science, cum laude, from Columbia University. At Columbia, his research focused on American politics, including voting, public opinion, and polarization. His current research interests broadly concern the same, as well as behavior and experimental methods.