Thomas J. Leeper

I am a behavioral scientist and R hacker working on experimental, survey, and computational approaches for understanding social and political phenomena. My research has focused on comparative public opinion, the political psychology of information seeking and attitude change, survey-experimental methodology, and applications of the R statistical programming language. My personal open source projects are described onmy GitHub profile.

I am currently a Research Scientist withCore Data Science at Facebook, based in London, and a Senior Visiting Fellow inMethodology atthe London School of Economics and Political Science. From 2015 to September 2018, I was Assistant Professor then then Associate Professor in Political Behaviour (with tenure) in theDepartment of Government at LSE. At LSE, I led undergraduate teaching and delivered courses onresearch design,the use of experimental methods in politics, andpublic opinion and political psychology. I coordinated the interdisciplinary Political Behaviour Seminar series and served on the school’s Research Ethics Committee.

Prior to that, I was a Postdoc in theInstitut for Statskundskab (Department of Political Science) atAarhus University in Aarhus, Denmark, where I studied interactions between political parties and public opinion. I received my MA and PhD from theDepartment of Political Science at Northwestern University, where I was a graduate fellow at theInstitute for Policy Research and served as founding coordinator of theNorthwestern Political Science Research Lab (PSRL). My PhD dissertation focused on incorporating information choice and over-time dynamics into the study of political communication and opinion formation. A native of Minnesota, I previously studied at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities with a BAmagna cum laude with Distinction in Political Science and Global Studies.