Peter Henne

I am a Research Associate with the Pew Research Center, focusing on international religious politics and methodology. I have substantive expertise in religious politics, international conflict, and the greater Middle East. Additionally, I have methodological expertise in quantitative methods, index development, and use of "big data" to understand global political outcomes. I have a PhD in Government from Georgetown University and have published articles in several scholarly journals. Beyond my academic work, I have a background in counterterrorism and government contracting.

At the Pew Research Center, I run a project that quantifies and analyzes levels of religious freedom around the world and across time. I am responsible for managing the data collection, ensuring methodological rigor and conducting analysis. Additionally, I write the annual report for the project and present its findings to a variety of audiences.

I have expertise in religion and politics, particularly among Muslim countries. I also have expertise in international conflict, specifically ideology and terrorism, and domestic effects on interstate conflict. Moreover, I have area expertise in Turkey, Pakistan and the Gulf countries from my doctoral research and field work.

I am proficient in quantitative methods intended to study international relations, as well as in index construction. I am comfortable with numerous methods that deal with unique aspects of political events, such as panel data, selection effects and endogeneity. I am also an expert in the use of indices to study complex or intangible concepts. In addition to my work at Pew on religious freedom, I have used indices to study counterterrorism, global governance and extremism.

Finally, I have been working on the use of "big data" to study international relations, using a variety of data sources--including Google Trends data and Twitter--and advanced methods such as social network analysis and machine learning.