Welcome to my website! I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, St. George Campus. I am cross-appointed with the Munk School of Global Affairs and am also a Faculty Affiliate at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. Before joining U of T, I was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. I received my PhD from l’Université de Montréal and my Honours BA and MA from the University of Toronto.
My research asks two questions at the heart of democratic politics: who gets to govern, and how AI is changing the way citizens learn about politics and make up their minds.
Representation: Who runs for office, who wins, and who gets filtered out along the way? To answer these questions, I built the largest publicly available dataset on Canadian federal candidates. It covers every election since 1867. I introduce it in “Who Runs? Canadian Federal and Ontario Provincial Candidates from 1867 to 2019” [Animation Video], and I update it after every election. This work earned me the SSHRC Impact Talent Award, which goes to one scholar in Canada each year. You can read more about these data here.
AI and Politics: Can AI help voters make sense of an election, and can it change their minds? I design and test AI chatbots that inform and persuade voters through conversation, using large-scale experiments in Canada and the United States. I am Principal Investigator on several grants for this work which include a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant to bring AI voting-advice tools into Canadian high school classrooms, and a CIFAR AI Catalyst Grant on repeated AI persuasion.
Some recent and ongoing projects include:
Chatbot Voting Advice Applications Inform But Seldom Sway Young Unaligned Voters (with Yamil Velez and Donald P. Green). Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Currently working on more work in this area. [Animation Video]
Can AI Help Reduce Prejudice? Evaluating the Effectiveness of AI-Powered Personalized Persuasion on Support for Transgender Rights (with Charles Crabtree, John Holbein and Mitchell Bosley). Published in PNAS Nexus.
AI Weakens, But Does Not Strengthen, Political Attitudes (with Can Mekik). Working Paper.
Mentoring: As the first person in my family to attend university, I know how challenging it can be to navigate higher education. If you are a first-generation student seeking mentorship (e.g., applying to grad school, grants or postdoc fellowships), please feel free to reach out using this form.
