Erin C. McGrath, Ph.D

Dr. Erin McGrath serves as NSF Post-doctoral Research Associate in Computational Social Science at START. Her research approach, through inter-disciplinary collaboration, combines complexity theory, social scientific research design, and computational methods. In particular, she focuses on how social media and other sources of unstructured data can shed new light on extant research problems. Currently her research looks at two problems the forefront of international affairs, subnational inequality and instability, and semi-authoritarian resilience. While inequality and instability have a storied relationship in political science, inequality is a growing problem and big data can improve our understanding of the impact it has on instability and conflict. The second line of research, based on her dissertation, is the contemporaneous problem of semi-authoritarian regimes that straddle democracy and authoritarianism by manipulating the rule-of-law and information flows to and between citizens.

Erin joined the University of Maryland-College Park/START as NSF Post-doctoral Research Associate in Computational Social Science in August 2015. Erin received her doctorate in Public and International Affairs at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh in August of 2015. She received her Master's degree in the inaugural class of the Public Policy program at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, before interning for the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany in a project on the diffusion of European law. Erin is originally from the wonderful state of Wisconsin, where she received her Bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In the interludes between her academic training, Erin worked as a international labor rights advocate and strategic corporate campaign research analyst at several labor organizations in Washington, D.C. She has also completed trainings in network analysis (CASOS and at INSNA), qualitative analysis (IQMR), and Turkish (Critical Language Scholarship Program in Ankara, Turkey).