Announcements

QSS Alumnus Published in the New Journal of Physics

Herbert Chang '18 recently published his QSS honors thesis in the New Journal of Physics.  Herbert completed and defended his thesis in May 2018 and in the summer after developed it further with his advisor, Feng Fu of the Department of Mathematics at Dartmouth College.  Titled "Co-diffusion of social contagions," Herbert's thesis explores multiple contagion processes which interact on a multiplex network. His work shows that intricate interdependencies give rise to new and fascinating phenomena that are applicable to wider contexts such as technological and product diffusion. Of Herbert, Professor Fu writes, "Thanks to the generous support of the QSS Program, his QSS thesis work is an important and innovative contribution at a time when dynamical channels and technologies influence each other. Hence there is a great desire to quantify synergy and how their inherent qualities influence each other."

Herbert is presently studying artificial intelligence in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.  He is focusing on agents and knowledge representation and hopes further to study the governance of artificial intelligence for human-machine cooperation.

QSS Steering committee member named Director of DCAL

Mathematics Professor and QSS steering committee member Scott Pauls has been Named Director of the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL).

Read more about his appointment here.

QSS Director of Undergraduate Research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science

QSS Director of Undergraduate Research Jeremy Ferwerda recently published an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. The article, titled, "Determinants of refugee naturalization in the United States," is a study of the naturalization rates of non-citizens in the United States.  PNAS describes the article as follows: "Despite the scale of the US refugee resettlement program, policymakers and the public lack systematic information on how refugees adapt to their new environment. We focus on naturalization as a key measure of integration and draw on administrative data to provide direct estimates of the naturalization rates among refugees. Our results show that, on average, refugees acquire citizenship faster than other lawful permanent residents. We also identify the set of factors that promote or constrain naturalization among refugees. These findings have implications for policymakers seeking to improve the integration of refugees within the United States."

Professor Ferwerda, whose research focuses on immigration and related political issues, received his doctorate in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has been at Dartmouth College since July 2016. Prior to his appointment in the Department of Government, Professor Ferwerda spent a year as a post-doctoral fellow at the Watson Institute of Brown University. In the Department of Government, Professor Ferwerda teaches courses on statistics and course in comparative politics.

QSS Postdoctoral fellow Jun Zhao presents at the 113th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association

On August 13, Jun Zhao, a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth College presented a paper at the 113th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, recently held in Philadelphia, PA. Jun's paper was titled, "Showing Remorse in Mock Criminal Trials," and it shows that defendants' expressed remorse influences jurors' sentencing decisions. Men, especially white men, enjoy greater benefits (in terms of sentence reduction) of displaying remorse than similarly remorseful white women, black men, and black women. Jun and her supervisor at Dartmouth, Kimberly Rogers of the Department of Sociology at Dartmouth, both spoke at a panel at the American Sociological Association meeting that honored the work of Neil McKinnon of the University of Guelph, winner of this year's Emotion Section Lifetime Achievement Award from the ASA. 

Jun has been at Dartmouth since the summer of 2017, and she is currently working on the role of emotion, gender, and culture in perpetuating workplace inequality and criminal injustice. She and Professor Rogers have a joint project exploring the social and psychological mechanisms that motivate self-organized collaborations. In particular, this project examines factors that determine the likelihood of success or failure in online collaborative networks (e.g. GitHub). Jun will be also working on modeling cross-cultural interactions with data collected from university undergraduates and from GitHub programmers. 

Congratulations to Postdoctural Fellow, Yuki Shiraito

Yuki Shiraito, a QSS postdoctoral fellow during the 2017-18 academic year, formally received his doctorate in Politics from Princeton University.  Yuki's dissertation, titled "Essays in Political Methodology," consists of a collection of papers on Bayesian statistical models with applications to treatment effect heterogeneity, text reuse, and citation networks.  Yuki's work at Princeton was supervised by Kosuke Imai (chair), Marc Ratkovic, Kristopher Ramsay, and Brandon Stewart.  As of September 1, 2018, Yuki will be Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan.  QSS congratulates Yuki on his accomplishments and looks forward to his next steps as a scholar.