Mellissa Meisels

Mellissa Meisels is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. Previously, she was a postdoctoral associate in the Center for the Study of American Politics at Yale and a Democracy Center visiting scholar at the University of Rochester. She received her Ph.D. in political science at Vanderbilt University, where she was affiliated with the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. She graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is originally from Portland, Oregon.

Meisels’s research centers on the U.S. Congress, money in politics, electoral campaigns, and political organizations. Much of this work investigates the strategic choices of candidates and financial contributors in congressional campaigns, with an emphasis on primary elections. To do so, she employs original data, natural language processing, causal inference tools, experiments, and structural estimation of formal models.