Oxford Computational Political Science Group

We are driven by three core objectives:

• Transform Oxford into a research hub for computational political science and AI applications by promoting research advances and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration.
• Train the next generation of computational talent by offering research opportunities, academic events, workshops, and peer-learning initiatives, addressing the shortage of quantitatively skilled graduates who can simultaneously understand the conceptual and theoretical side of socio-political challenges.
• Illuminate interdisciplinary pathways for students and researchers to leverage data and computational tools, applying actionable insights to real-world policy problems and making a positive impact beyond academia.

We are committed to contributing to the public good beyond Oxford:

• We develop programmes and activities that serve as an international capacity-building exercise, equipping the next generation of researchers and practitioners with essential computational skills and methodological expertise to address pressing challenges. By training students and early-career researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and institutions worldwide, we are developing a global network of scholars capable of applying rigorous computational methods to pressing problems and emerging challenges that affect societies everywhere.
• We bridge different stakeholders across academia, policy, and practice. Our policy engagement and international partnerships demonstrate our commitment to ensuring that research findings reach those who can translate them into actionable insights. We place particular emphasis on translating technical and AI-driven insights into accessible, decision-relevant outputs, helping policymakers and practitioners interpret evidence, assess risks, and incorporate data-informed tools into real-world governance processes. By creating spaces for dialogue between researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and the broader public, we facilitate the exchange of ideas and evidence-based solutions to critical political challenges.
• We foster intellectual exchanges that transcend traditional disciplinary and institutional boundaries. Our events and research programmes bring together individuals from diverse backgrounds, creating opportunities for innovative cross-pollination of ideas. This multidisciplinary approach generates novel perspectives on socio-political phenomena and develops methodological innovations that not only advance scholarship but also directly inform policy design and implementation.
  We adopt an evidence-based approach and our work sheds light on emerging issues that have direct relevance to public goods. Our work on topics such as online information diffusion, LLM bias, and the manosphere addresses pressing concerns about digital democracy, misinformation, and political polarisation. By producing rigorous, accessible research on these issues and presenting findings at major conferences and policy forums, we contribute to informed public discourse and evidence-based policymaking on challenges that affect citizens across the globe and could be existential in nature.
   

Bosco Hung (Co-Founder and Director)
Bosco is an MPhil candidate in International Relations at the University of Oxford. He graduated with a BSc in Politics and International Relations (first class honours) from LSE, where he studied on a full scholarship. He is a Fellow at the Cambridge AI Safety Hub, where he delivers research analysis to the MIT FutureTech AI Governance Mapping project. He is a Researcher at the International Team for the Study of Security Verona and was a Fellow at the Future Impact Group, where he delivered research on the governance of advanced AI systems and contributed to working papers published by the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative. He has written for the Journal of Computational Social Science, the Journal of Cyber Policy, South China Morning Post, The Diplomat, Tech Policy Press, UDN, Initium Media, and other peer-reviewed publications and media outlets. Besides having been interviewed by France 24 and Al Jazeera to provide geopolitical analyses, he was invited to speak at the European Parliament's Liaison Office in the UK about disinformation and media literacy.

Nachiket Midha (Co-Founder and Director)
Nachiket holds a Master’s degree in Politics from the University of Oxford. He is currently a Predoctoral Researcher at the National University of Singapore’s Department of Economics. He was a finalist for the India Conference at Harvard Policy Hackathon hosted at Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School. He was also the co-recipient of the King Edward VII prize at the Entente Cordiale Day. Previously, he has had research stints with think tanks in India and Singapore, including the National University of Singapore’s Institute of South Asian Studies (NUS-ISAS) and the Observer Research Foundation (ORF). His research and views have been published in the Print, Columbia Journal of Asia, and South China Morning Post, among others. He is interested in the application of synthetic agents to understand policy effects.

Jeffrey Love (Assistant Director/Director of Special Projects)
Jeffrey is a PhD candidate in International Relations at the University of Oxford. He holds an MPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford and a BSc in International Relations from LSE. He is a specialist in economic sanctions and the application of advanced computational methods to measure effectiveness. Jeffrey has worked with the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Global Public Policy Institute, and the U.S. Department of State.
 

Policy Engagement

• Zoey England (Director of Policy Engagement and Leadership Development)
  Zoey is passionate about building bridges between academic researchers and policymakers through entrepreneurial approaches. She recently completed a fellowship funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships around building use-inspired research communities. Prior to this, she served as Chief of Staff at the University of Connecticut Werth Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation. Zoey has worked with national and international organizations, including the United Nations, NATO, and USAID. Zoey has published recently in The International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, The Conversation, and Stanford Social Innovation Review. Zoey is currently completing an MSc in Social Research Methods at LSE. She also holds an individualized B.A. in Population Health, Disease, & Policy from the University of Connecticut.

Research Leader

• Bastián González-Bustamante (Research Leader)
  Bastián is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Computational Social Science at Leiden University and an Associate Professor of Public Administration at Universidad Diego Portales. He holds a DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford, and he works on building large-scale text-as-data pipelines, deploying AI and machine learning, and applying causal inference strategies in downstream analyses. He has published in Social Science Computer Review, Public Opinion Quarterly, World Development, Artificial Intelligence and Law, Government and Opposition, etc. He is currently working on an NWO-funded project using LLMs to analyse sustainable finance flows. In parallel, he contributes to COST Action CA22150 on executive-bureaucratic careers and leads an Enlace-UDP project on NLP and LLMs to examine cabinet politics in presidential democracies.
• Daria Godorozha (Research Leader)
  Daria is currently studying for an MSc by Research in the Statistics department at LSE. Prior to this, she graduated with an MSc in AI with distinction and also studied law at KCL. She was one of the winners of the Stanford/Cambridge AI in law hackathon which primarily focuses on agents and NLP. She has spoken at several conferences on the topic of AI and worked on AI projects for organisations such as the Bank of England, the United Nations, Stanford, a large fine art investment fund, etc. She also has experience in AI education at Stanford, LSE, etc.
• Sara Gabrielli (Research Leader)
  Sara is an LLM student at LSE, focusing on public international law and human rights. She holds a LLB from the University of Luxembourg. Sara has completed internships at the European Parliament, Cerno Law Firm, and various Luxembourg public institutions, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Council of State. Currently, Sara serves as Vice-President of Aidons-tous Solidarité and as Secretary General of Bonnievale Projects, two organizations dedicated to development cooperation and education across Africa. In 2024, she was honoured with a Human Rights Fellowship by the International Council on Human Rights, Peace and Politics. As Luxembourg’s Youth Delegate to both the European Union and the APF, Sara has been a vital voice in youth policymaking on EU and international platforms.
• Stephan Wenninger
  Stephan is an MSc candidate in Applied Social Data Science at LSE, where he is specialising in machine learning and graph data analytics. His research focuses on the effects of the climate crisis on economic and political development. In his latest work, he leverages quantitative methods to investigate the effects of natural hazards on economically and socially relevant factors, such as home values. Stephan obtained an MSc in Applied Economics and a BA in Political Science from the University of Vienna. In addition to his academic experience, he has a background in journalism.
• Ryan Ratnam
  Ryan is a researcher based out of the Pennsylvania State University and has recently completed an MSc in Social Science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute. His research focuses on online communities, malicious online actors, and digital harms. He has presented this research at several conferences, including in San Francisco, Prague, and Oxford. He has approached these topics with a wide range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, including interviews, social network analysis, natural language processing, ethnography, and experiments. His work seeks to address data and methodological constraints surrounding hard-to-reach communities, and to produce interventions in line with, and complementary to, current online safety legislative frameworks. Ryan also has a BA in History from UCL and experience in print and video journalism.
• Maria Milosh
  Maria is a data scientist and researcher working at the intersection of civic technology, political science, and democratic innovation. She holds an MSc in Computational Analysis and Public Policy from the University of Chicago and conducts research in collaboration with the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics, the World Bank, and the City of New York. She teaches a course on Civic Technology and Algorithms for Social Good at Bard College, New York. Maria is active in the international civic tech community, contributing to projects on deliberative democracy, algorithmic accountability, and digital participation. She regularly writes about the future of democratic innovation and deliberative tech.

Researcher

• Alice Malmberg
  Alice is a political scientist, computational social scientist, and PhD candidate in American Politics and Methodology at UC Davis. Her computational work explores how we might use machine learning and AI strategies to enhance survey and experimental outcomes across the social sciences. Substantively, she explores Americans’ perceptions and reactions to ideologically extreme policymaking and similar state and local political outcomes.
• Yiwen Zhang
  Yiwen is a PhD student in the Department of Government and the Data Science Institute at LSE, supported by the Enlighten Scholarship. Her research employs computational methods to examine the political economy of inequality, public opinion, and social policy in China and the UK. Prior to LSE, she obtained her degrees from Peking University and worked as a data analyst at the International Organization for Migration.

Research Associate

• Tom Bellens (University of Antwerp)
• Christopher Klamm (University of Mannheim)
• Marta Koch (Imperial)
• ⁠⁠Alina Ahmed (De Montfort University)
• Nourhan Hashish (Sciences Po)
• Samuel Inman-Altass (LSE)
• Martin Maitino (Brazilian Centre for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP))
• Rajwardahan Rana (LSE)
• Carter Roger (University of Cambridge)
• Sanjana Shikhar (LSE)
• Rala Sulami (Princeton)
• Emily Deng (Yale)
• Dillion Lee (LSE)
• Yagmur Ozturk (LSE)
• Victor Y. Wu (Stanford University)
• Love Adu (UC Berkeley)
• Melissa Cardona Agudelo (Lund University)
• Gabriel Oliveira de Alarcão (Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) in Brazil's Department of Economic Studies)
• Natalie Masetti (Columbia)
• Ryan Rousseau (LSE)
• Fynn Bachmann (University of Zurich)
• Peiyu Chen (Chicago)
• Anastasia (Asya) Gergel (NYU / MetaGov)
• Rajib Ahmed (LSE)
• Ari Bersch (Oxford)
• Xuelong Fu (Cambridge)
• Tushar Nagar (Oxford)
• Antonina Sinelnik (NVIDIA)
• Julian Anthony Theseira (Charles University)

Research Leader

• Thomas Brailey (Oxford)
• Calvin Cheng (Oxford)
• Zihao Zhang (Oxford)

Research Associate

• Samuel Allen (Oxford)
• Haoyu Han (Oxford)
• Ewan Messenger (Oxford)
• Amelia Mills (Oxford)
• William Pelletiers (Oxford)
• Başak Bozkurt (Oxford)
• Ryan Ratnam (Oxford)
• James Rice (Essex)
• Lucca Rallo Vanderchmitt (LSE)
• Cindy Feng (Oxford)
• Jianyu Hao (UC San Diego)
• Ruyi Liu (LSE)
• Harrison Moores (LSE)