The Emerging Scholar Award

The Emerging Scholar Committee is pleased to announce Molly Roberts as the 2021 Society for Political Methodology Emerging Scholar Award recipient. Roberts has made important contributions to the field of political methodology in scholarship, service, and mentorship. Roberts is an intellectual leader in the field of political methodology for her contributions to the methods of automated content analysis, topic models, and experimentation. Her work in this area has been published in Political Analysis, American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Nature, and Science, among other outlets.  Her co-authored book, Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences, will be published this year by Princeton University Press. In addition, she has co-developed multiple R packages, including the popular stm package for structural topic models. Much of her substantive research has focused on the politics of censorship in China, including an award-winning book, Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2018). Roberts is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at the University of California, San Diego, where she also holds the Chancellor’s Associates Endowed Chair. She received her PhD in government from Harvard University in 2014. Finally, Roberts is an active member of the Society—winner of the 2014 PolMeth Harold F. Gosnell Prize, a frequent participant in the summer meeting, and a member of Political Analysis editorial board.