The Emerging Scholar Award

The Political Methodology Emerging Scholar Award honors a young researcher, within ten years of their degree, who is making notable contributions to the field of political methodology.

2021 Winner
Recipient Molly Roberts (UC San Diego)
Citation

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.

Selection committee Sunshine Hillygus (Duke, chair), Burt Monroe (Penn State), and Tom Clark (Emory)

Past Recipients

Year Recipient
2020 Jacob Montgomery (Washington University in St. Louis)
2019 Teppei Yamamoto (MIT)
2018 Arthur Spirling (NYU)
2017 Betsy Sinclair (Washington University in St. Louis)
2016 Rocio Titiunik (University of Michigan)
2015 Justin Grimmer (Stanford)
2014 Jens Hainmueller (Stanford)
2013 Luke J. Keele (Penn State)
2012 Jake Bowers (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
2011 Kosuke Imai (Princeton)

Past Selection Committees

Year Recipient
2020 Sunshine Hillygus (Duke, chair), Burt Monroe (Penn State), and Tom Clark (Emory)
2019 Luke Keele (University of Pennsylvania), Arthur Spirling (New York University), Sunshine Hillygus (Duke University), and Jake Bowers (University of Illinois)
2018 Suzanna Linn (Penn State, chair), Sunshine Hillygus (Duke), Luke Keele (Georgetown), and Walter Mebane (Michigan)
2017 Lonna Atkeson (New Mexico, Chair), Walter Mebane (Michigan) and Jeff Gill (American)
2016 Josh Clinton (Vanderbilt, Chair), Adam Berinsky (MIT), Jens Heinmueller (Stanford), Jas Sekhon (UC Berkeley)
2015 Fred Boehmke (Chair), Jake Bowers, Jude Hays, Kosuke Imai
2014 Fred Boehmke (Chair), Jake Bowers, Jude Hays, Kosuke Imai
2013 Simon Jackman (Chair), Wendy Tam Cho, Kevin Quinn, Jeffrey Lewis
2012 Simon Jackman (Chair), Wendy Tam Cho, Kevin Quinn, Jeffrey Lewis