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Connecting Dots
Greetings!
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​I am a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania's Identity & Conflict Lab and will be starting as a senior lecturer (assistant professor) at Hebrew University in October 2023. I study violence, protest, and prejudice through the lens of social networks. In particular:

  1. I use surveys and interviews to examine how cross-ethnic friendship networks led to rescuing and assistance in the Bosnian war

  2. I study how cross-racial networks mobilized protesters during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S.

  3. I develop statistical methods for detecting spillover effects in network experiments

  4. I co-direct the monthly Political Networks Online Colloquium (PNOC)

  5. I conduct experiments on reducing prejudice against refugees in Uganda, Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey

  6. As a member of the COVID States Project, I analyze trends in gun-buying, mental health, civic trust, and political violence during the pandemic across the US

I have articles in Perspectives on Politics and the British Journal of Political Science and forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science. I earned my Ph.D. in network science from Northeastern University, where I was a Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Dissertation Fellow. My work has been covered in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, CBS, and NPR. I can be reached at msimonso@sas.upenn.edu
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