ISPS Welcomes Incoming Cohort of Political Science Fellows

The Institution for Social and Policy Studies is excited to introduce its newest group of predoctoral and postdoctoral fellows in political science.

“Our faculty are eager to collaborate with these tremendous scholars,” said ISPS Director Alan Gerber, Sterling Professor of Political Science. “By recruiting recent graduates as well as individuals who have completed their doctoral studies, we help them take the next steps in their academic careers while enhancing our capacity to produce impactful interdisciplinary research.”

Meet our new postdoctoral fellows:

Alexander Love is a postdoctoral associate with Democratic Innovations, an ISPS program focused on identifying and testing new ideas to improve the quality of democratic representation and governance. The program supports conferences, postdoctoral associates, and research on public policy, political behavior, elections, and more.

Love earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previously, he earned his M.A. in political science from UNC and his B.A. in public policy and data analytics from William & Mary. His research investigates how administrative procedures and legal structures shape policy outcomes and contribute to inequality in the United States, with a focus on the federal bureaucracy and the criminal justice system. His work has appeared in Policy Studies Journal, Perspectives on Politics, and American Criminal Law Review.

Itay Machtei is a postdoctoral associate with the Consortium on the American Political Economy (CAPE) based at the American Political Economy eXchange (APEX), an ISPS program dedicated to the study of American democratic capitalism — the analysis of the interplay of markets and government in the United States.

Machtei completed his Ph.D. in political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2025. His research agenda focuses on the social and distributive outcomes of state and market institutions and is organized around two complementary strands. The first investigates how labor and social policies shape income inequality in postindustrial democracies, and the second examines how market-expanding reforms influence citizens’ policy preferences and democratic tenets like political accountability.

Philip Moniz is a postdoctoral associate who received a Ph.D. in government from the University of Texas at Austin in 2024. His research ranges across political behavior and political psychology, with interest in the causes and consequences of voters’ policy attitudes.

Moniz focuses on how information changes people’s satisfaction with the status quo and what they want from the government. Using survey experiments and panel data, he looks at problems such as opioid addiction, rent burden, internet insecurity, teen suicide, job loss, and more to understand the psychological dynamics underlying problem perception in the mass public.

Eli Rau is a postdoctoral associate with Democratic Innovations at ISPS and the Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. His primary areas of research include comparative electoral institutions, voter turnout, and democratic erosion. In current research projects, he examines the link between economic inequality and democratic erosion, whether compulsory voting is good for democracy, and how norms of reciprocity can enable democratic erosion even in the absence of strong partisanship.

Prior to joining ISPS, Rau earned his Ph.D. in political science at Yale and held postdoctoral positions at Princeton University and Vanderbilt University. He is also an assistant professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Monterrey, Mexico. 

This year’s six new predoctoral fellows have embarked on a two-year fellowship supported by ISPS’s Center for the Study of American Politics (CSAP) and the Tobin Center for Economic Policy. Throughout the program, fellows serve as full-time research assistants to ISPS faculty, while also engaging in academic coursework — either for credit or audit — each semester. Their experience is further enriched by weekly professional development sessions and regular attendance at research seminars in political science and economics.

Members of the inaugural predoctoral fellowship class have gone on to pursue graduate studies at some of the country’s most prestigious institutions, including Columbia University’s political science Ph.D. program, Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Law School, and Harvard University’s Department of Government.

“This initiative has quickly proven its value in preparing students for advanced study in political science while contributing meaningfully to faculty research,” said Gregory Huber, CSAP director and Forst Family Professor of Political Science. “We’re incredibly proud of our first cohort and delighted to welcome the newest fellows into our scholarly community.”

Meet the 2025–27 ISPS-Tobin predoctoral fellows:

Zoya Ahmer is a predoctoral fellow working for ISPS faculty fellows Shiro Kuriwaki, assistant professor of political science, and Joshua Kalla, associate professor of political science. Zoya graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A in philosophy, politics, and economics and minors in survey research & data analytics and Latin American and Latinx studies. Her research interests include political behavior, election law and administration, and public policy.

Bronwen Boyd is a predoctoral fellow working on the Democratic Party in the knowledge economy with Jacob Hacker, ISPS faculty fellow and Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science, and Paul Pierson, John Gross Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She graduated summa cum laude from Emory University with a B.A. in history (concentrating in law, economics, and human rights) and French studies in May 2022 and obtained her M.Res. in political science from L’Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) in June 2025. Her broad research interests include comparative political economy, American political economy (APE), and the intersections between APE and law. 

Jingyi Chen is a predoctoral fellow working with Daniel Mattingly, associate professor of political science. She received a B.S. in political science/data analytics from the University of California, San Diego. Her current research interests include how socio-political information is shaped in the evolving digital media environment as well as the mechanisms of government control and responsiveness in authoritarian states. In her most recent research, she employed computational text analysis methods and large language model (LLM) application programming interfaces (API) to investigate state media in China.

Julia Crainic is a predoctoral fellow working with ISPS faculty fellow Christina Kinane, assistant professor of political science, on research examining the relationship between the executive branch and Congress. Prior to Yale, she was an associate in the antitrust and competition practice at Charles River Associates. Julia earned her B.A. from Wesleyan University, where she double majored in government and economics and minored in data analysis. Her research interests lie in American political institutions — particularly the separation of powers and interbranch dynamics — and quantitative methods.

Julianne Lempert is a predoctoral fellow working with ISPS faculty fellows Melody Huang and Mellissa Meisels on political methodology and American politics. Julianne graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with a B.A. in political science and a minor in statistics and data science. Her research interests include voting behavior, candidate psychology, and election administration, with an emphasis on minority candidates and voting blocs.

Jack Starobin (he/they) is a predoctoral fellow working with Jacob Hacker, ISPS faculty fellow and Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science, and Paul Pierson, John Gross Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His current research draws on geospatial data and American political history to understand the Democratic Party’s political strategy, policy choices, and electoral performance in a post-industrial knowledge economy. Starobin also has theoretical interests in the politics of space, identity formation, and dissent. Before joining CSAP, Jack worked as a data analyst and litigation assistant at the ACLU of Pennsylvania. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in political science, a B.A. in economics, a minor in survey research and data analytics, and a minor in Hispanic studies.