conjugateprior

Welcome. I am a political methodologist specializing in statistical text analysis and causal inference, with applied work in legislative politics, political economy, social media and public policy. You can read about all that on the publications page, in the trusty CV, or just that one time in the New York Times.

I’m a Senior Research Scientist at the Hertie School in Berlin. In fact, I’m the Senior Research Scientist at Hertie School, since they admit they don’t have any others. This makes me very special - even specialer than being a Senior Research Specialist back at Princeton because there were quite a few of those. I just thought you ought to know that.

That said, I shall be spending the next few months in the Government Department at the University of Vienna. They don’t know this yet, so don’t ruin the surprise. Vienna, though. So exciting, and it will do wonders for my German.

Day to day, I’ve got a desk in the Hertie School’s Data Science Lab, two courses in its newly launched Data Science Masters, and a supporting actor role in the Hertie School’s Research Consulting service (internal link).

If you want to see that desk, conveniently wrapped in my office, then check out the contact page. It’s over at Hertie’s FlixBus campus on Alexanderstrasse. Note that this year we’ve all been moved upstairs to the 7th floor, presumably because too many of you were finding us. But next year we will be back in Friedrichstrasse and will continue to alternate these locations in a Nietzschean cycle of eternal return.

If you’re wondering what I did before Hertie, this biographical sketch probably won’t help much, although it does implicate a lot of people who should have known better.

Outside of work you can find me on Bluesky, decreasingly on Mastodon, no longer on Muskelon or U+1D54F or whatever it’s called now. I’m sometimes also on stats.stackexchange.com and slowly moving off GitHub.

There’s an actual old-school blog here too, though I no longer remember why. Apparently the post on fiddly formulae in lme4 and the one on random effects in Bayesian models are the draws.

Pretty much everywhere on the web I’m conjugateprior and a storm over Styria, but if you’d need to pick me out of a lineup then you can study this picture, taken in my natural habitat (tweed).

Questions you were not asking

The site is made with Ark and hosted on Opalstack, a nice Webfaction successor. Search comes from DuckDuckGo with cookie-less and GDPR-compliant site analytics from Plausible.

There are no trackers because I don’t particularly want to know who you are and wouldn’t exactly know what to do if I did. Maybe I’d wave and say ‘Hi!’ But I can do that already.

[waves] Hi!