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GradQuant Staff

 

Kevin Esterling
Dr. Kevin Esterling, GradQuant Faculty Director

Dr. Esterling is a professor in the Department of Political Science and the School of Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside. His research focuses on deliberative democracy in American national politics. His current work identifies the conditions that lead citizens to engage constructively in public discourse. He is the author of The Political Economy of Expertise: Information and Efficiency in American National Politics (University of Michigan Press, 2004). He has published in a number of journals, including The American Political Science Review, Political Analysis, The Journal of Politics, Rationality and Society, Political Communication, and the Journal of Theoretical Politics. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and by the MacArthur Foundation. Esterling was previously a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of California, Berkeley and a postdoctoral research fellow at the A. Alfred Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions at Brown University. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago in 1999.

Email: kevin.esterling@ucr.edu


 

Diogo smiling at the camera
Dr. Diogo Ferrari, GradQuant Associate Faculty Director

Dr. Ferrari is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. His research focuses on political methodology and comparative political behavior. He investigates the relationship between socioeconomic conditions, cognitive perceptions about the socioeconomic environment, opinion formation, and political behavior. His research on political methodology focuses on causal inference, machine learning, Bayesian statistics, semi-parametric Bayesian models, and computational methods for social science. Before joining the University of California, Riverside, he worked at the University of Chicago where he taught at the Computational Social Science department. He is a research associate at the Center for Metropolitan Studies (CEM/USP) in Brazil. Dr. Ferrari holds Ph. D. in Political Science and Scientific Computing from the Department of Political Science and the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering (MICDE) and a graduate degree in statistics at the University of Michigan.

Email: diogo.ferrari@ucr.edu


 

A photo of Jason from the shoulders up, smiling, wearing a black t-shirt and tan jacket
Jason Chou, GradQuant and Graduate Student Resource Center Coordinator

Jason has been supporting student success at UCR since 2004. He has an M.A. in TESOL (Biola U.) and taught English language at Mt. San Antonio College and at Chiang Mai University before coming to UCR. He also has a B.A. in Physiology and Cell Biology (UC Santa Barbara) and an M.A. in Philosophy (Talbot Theological Seminary), and his background includes studies in higher education (UC Riverside) and music production (Musicians Institute). He enjoys spending time with his family, and in his solo moments he likes to read, play guitar, surf, or observe clear night skies with binoculars and a telescope.

Email: jason.chou@ucr.edu
Office Hours: Mondays, 10am - 11am
Office: Life Sciences 1425
Phone: (951) 827-4291


 

Da Gong
Da Gong, GradQuant Lead Consultant

Da is a Ph.D. student in Economics at the University of California, Riverside. He previously earned his M.A. in History from the Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and worked as a research assistant at the China Gazetteer Project at Harvard University. Da's research interests include political economy, labor economics, and development economics. In particular, he studies the role of political propaganda and social media in explaining individual behavior and belief updates. He is also interested in the impact of COVID on the labor market.

Da is on the 2023-2024 job market! please visit his personal website for more information.

Specialties: causal inference (e.g., difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity design, and instrumental variable), math for statistics, statistical inference, probability theory, R, Python, Stata, web scraping, natural language processing, text analysis software, LaTeX, GitHub

Email: gradquant@ucr.edu
Office: Life Sciences 1425
Phone: (951) 827-4291


 

Michael smiling at camera
Michael Remington, GradQuant Consultant

Michael is a Ph.D student in the evolutionary biology joint doctoral program with San Diego State and UC Riverside. Michael attended Carroll College in Helena, Montana and studied biology and mathematics as an undergraduate. He worked as a data analyst for several years before starting graduate school. His current research is in developing methods for analyzing predator-prey dynamics and how climate change may cause shifts in these dynamics. He is also interested in system dynamics, Bayesian statistics, machine learning, geospatial analysis, and time series analysis.

Specialties: R programming, Python, SQL, Bash scripting, Git, LaTeX, regression analysis, supervised machine learning, time series analysis, Bayesian statistics and probability