Lab Directors

Tom Clark

Tom Clark is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Political Science at Emory University. He has published three books and more than 35 articles on topics including judicial politics, criminal justice, rational choice institutionalism, democratic political institutions, and applied formal theory and statistical methods. His research has won awards from multiple professional associations and been featured in media coverage, and Clark has provided expert testimony before state courts and legislatures. Clark also holds a courtesy appointment in the Emory Law School and has been a visiting scholar at Princeton University and at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Toulouse School of Economics. Find more about Clark on his personal website and contact him via email.

Adam Glynn

Adam Glynn is Associate Professor and Winship Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science
and Quantitative Theory and Methods at Emory University with a secondary appointment in the Department Biostatistics and Bioinformatics. Glynn’s research focuses on problems of causal inference and measurement for social science applications. This work has been supported by numerous grants and has been published at leading journals of social science and statistics. Find more about Glynn on his personal website and contact him via email.

Michael Leo Owens

Michael Leo Owens, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Political Science at Emory University. He designed and teaches the course “Policing & Politics,” which is novel for Political Science departments in the United States. A scholar of urban politics, his current projects beyond studies of policing in the U.S. include a book on community organizing for the restoration of political, social, and civic rights to formerly imprisoned people. Owens’s publications include the book God and Government in the Ghetto: The Politics of Church-State Collaboration in Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals. A former chair of the governing board of the Urban Affairs Association and former member of the board of directors of Prison Policy Initiative, Owens currently serves on multiple editorial boards and volunteers with the Youth Diversion Program of the DeKalb County (Georgia) Juvenile Court. Find more about Owens on his personal website and contact him via email.

Post-Doctoral and Graduate Researchers

Joshua Tschantret

Joshua Tschantret is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Politics of Policing Lab. He is interested in political violence and state repression, with an emphasis on violence against minority groups. His research on these topics is published in various academic journals, including British Journal of Political Science and International Studies Quarterly. He received his PhD in Political Science at the University of Iowa in May 2020.

Elisha Cohen

Elisha Cohen is a graduate student in the Department of Political Science at Emory University and a current recipient of the Laney Graduate School Woodruff fellowship. Her research interests include applications of causal inference for observational data with a focus on gender and race in American Politics. Previously she received an M.A. in Economics from Hunter College and worked as a political science research assistant at MIT.

Kaylyn Jackson Schiff

Kaylyn Jackson Schiff is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at Emory University.  Her research focuses on citizen contact with government, accountability in local politics, and the impacts of new technological platforms on citizen participation and politician responsiveness.  Kaylyn has presented at conferences for the Southern Political Science Association, the Harvard Experiments Working Group, and the American Association for Public Opinion Research.  Her work on city council oversight and selective responsiveness to 311 service requests won the best paper award at the 2019 Emory Department of Political Science second-year graduate student conference.  Prior to Emory, Kaylyn received a B.A. in Public Policy from Princeton University and an M.Ed. from Fordham University.

 

Lab Affiliates and Alumni

Anna Gunderson

Anna Gunderson is an Assistant Professor at Louisiana State University and was a graduate affiliate of the Politics of Policing Lab. She specializes in American politics; the politics of punishment and policing; judicial politics; state politics; and public policy. She has won four prizes for this work, including the 2020 Mooney Prize for the best dissertation in state politics and policy. In addition, she has projects on gubernatorial support for corrections policy; Black state political representation and corrections spending; female police officers and arrests for sex crimes; ban the box initiatives; officer-involved shootings; police militarization; and the relationship between judicial ideology and outcomes in prisoners’ rights cases. Her work has been published in the Journal of Politics and is forthcoming at the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics.

Paul Zachary

Paul was a member of the lab from 2017-2018. While there, he worked on topics related to causal inference and machine learning. His PhD is from the University of California, San Diego. He has subsequently held various roles in industry related to AI.