Data & Democracy

Moon Duchin (MS’99, PhD’05) is a Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at the University of Chicago.  Her background in pure math centers on geometry, topology, groups, and dynamics; her applied work uses these tools to build algorithms and models to study the mechanisms of democracy.  She runs a multidisciplinary lab bringing math and computing into conversation with law, policy, and geography.  Duchin has served as an expert in numerous voting rights court cases around the country, and her scholarly work has been recognized with an NSF CAREER award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Sloan Professorship at SLMath (formerly the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute) and by election as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.  She is also an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute, which is dedicated to the study of complex systems.

Ge Fang is a research software engineer at the Data and Democracy lab. He worked for several years at Google’s search team after getting a computer science degree from Tsinghua University. Then he spent over a decade studying philosophy, first at Stanford and then at Washington University in St. Louis, thinking about issues related to human evolution, expertise acquisition, and methods of social sciences. Now he is working at Districtr, a public facing redistricting website run by the Data and Democracy lab.

Grace Gibson is a Research Software Engineer at the Data Science Institute, splitting her time between the Data & Democracy lab and the DSI core facility team. She develops data-driven solutions for community organizations. Prior to joining DSI, she worked as a software engineer at GE HealthCare. Grace holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a BS in Biocomputing from Marquette University.

Maria is a predoc at the Data & Democracy lab. She received a Ms in Computational Analysis for Public Policy at UChicago. Previously she worked as a data scientist at the World Bank and for the New York City. Maria is interested in computational social choice and civic technology.

Elliot Sher (he/him) recently graduated from the University of Chicago, where he studied sociology and law with research grounded in digital humanities. His interests lie in corruption and transnational financial flows, with a focus on computational methods. He works primarily with leaked archives, combining close reading with text analysis at scale.

Sam Stephenson is a predoc at the Data and Democracy Lab. He received bachelor’s degrees in history and mathematics and a master’s degree in social science from the University of Chicago. His research interests focus on the economic geography of 19th century US expansion and applying computational social science to the study of history. In his free time he enjoys reading, playing chess poorly, and watching movies.