MSU PLS pleased to announce the hiring of Andrew Halterman

April 9, 2021

Mr. Halterman, PhD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will join the faculty of political methodology in the fall of 2022.

"Andrew Halterman's work is at the frontier of new measurement approaches within computational social science. We are excited about the expertise he brings in text-as-data and computer programming, and how that will build upon our programs in political methodology and international relations," said Dr. Corwin Smidt, chair of MSU Political Science. 

Following his spring 2021 graduation, Mr. Halterman will spend a year as a fellow at the Center for Data Science at @NYUDataScience.

Mr. Halterman's dissertation develops new techniques in natural language processing to better understand international conflict and civil war. His projects include new techniques for extracting political events from text, automatically learning events from text, resolving place names in text to their geographic coordinates, linking events with the locations where they occur, generating event data in Arabic, creating novel datasets to understand the determinants of violence against civilians in Syria, and on extracting warning signals of conflict from declassified cables.

Before starting at MIT, Mr. Halterman worked at Caerus Analytics in Washington, DC, developing open source analysis software for DARPA. After graduating from Amherst College, he  spent a year in Kosovo on a Fulbright fellowship. He has consulted as a data scientist/engineer for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Kensho Technologies, the Political Instability Task Force, a number of university research projects, and a sports betting operation.