Our Team
Erik Wibbels
Principal Investigator
Bio
Dr. Wibbels’ research focuses on development, decentralized governance, and other areas of political economy. He has worked with USAID’s DRG Centre, USAID mission officers, AidData, RTI International, the World Bank and others on projects around the world. Erik is the PI on the Machine Learning for Peace project.
Mateo Villamizar Chaparro
PhD Candidate
Bio
Mateo is a PhD student in political economy at the department of Political Science. His research interests include analyzing the politics of public goods’ distribution and violence in developing countries. With an emphasis in economic development, migration, state capacity and political institutions.
Zung-Ru Lin
Data Scientist
Bio
Zung-Ru is working as a Data Scientist that helps solve technical issues encountered. His work mainly focuses on optimizing the overall functionality and productivity within the peace project pipeline framework and implementing NLP and various supervised machine learning methods in detecting civic-space changes.
Diego Romero
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Bio
Diego is a PhD candidate at Duke University’s Political Science Department specializing in Political Economy and Political Methodology. He is interested in issues of governance, in particular corruption and accountability. His other research interests include reintegration of deported migrants and the spatial distribution of public service delivery.
Jeremy Springman
Senior Research Associate
Bio
Jeremy is a Senior Research Associate at DevLab@Duke and the Department of Political Science. He studies political economy in developing countries, with a specific interest in how non-profit organizations shape, and are shaped by, politics and governance. His work has received support from the National Science Foundation and the US Agency for International Development, among others.
Roya Talibova
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Bio
Roya Talibova is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Pennsylvania’s DevLab@Penn. In Fall 2023, she will join Vanderbilt University’s Political Science Department and Data Science Institute as Assistant Professor. She recently received her Ph.D. in Political Science and Scientific Computing and M.S. in Statistics from the University of Michigan. She studies political violence and its long-run effects on political economy and development, with a special emphasis on the broader Eurasian region. In her research, she synthesizes data science, history, and developmental economics with political science to better understand the drivers and outcomes of violence. Her work has been supported by the Carnegie Foundation, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies. She holds an MPA (2014) degree from Harvard University and an MA in International Relations from Seton Hall University, John Whitehead School of Diplomacy.
Hanling Su
Data Scientist
Bio
Hanling joined Devlab@Duke as a Data Scientist. She works mainly on data engineering that focuses on web scraping and data preparation. By applying machine learning and natural language processing techniques, Hanling ensures the project’s data integrity. She is also responsible for implementing the data pipeline for Machine Learning for Peace project at DevLab.
Serkant Adiguzel
Asst Professor of Political Science
Bio
Serkant is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Political Science at Duke University and a Middle East Initiative predoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He specializes in political economy and political methodology. His research interests lie at the intersection of the political economy of democratic backsliding, digital media, and public services.
Mitali Mishra
MA Research Fellow
Bio
Mitali is a graduate student pursuing Master’s in Data Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She is passionate about working with data and applying machine learning techniques to understand it’s underlying structure. Her work on the Machine Learning for Peace project focuses on building data pipeline and optimising predictive models along with data engineering which involves web data scraping.
Nikhil Srivastava
Undergraduate Research Fellow
Bio
Nikhil is an undergraduate sophomore studying Political Science and Finance. He is interested in civic engagement, voting habits, and campaigns. As part of DevLabs, he is excited to learn about civic activity in developing regions and how media and administrations wield influence.
Andreas Beger
Consultant
Bio
Andreas Beger is an independent consultant with 10 years experience in developing data-driven geopolitical forecasting systems. He has worked on projects funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the Political Instability Task Force (PITF), the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, and others. He received a Ph.D. in political science from Florida State University in 2012.
Donald Moratz
Research Associate
Bio
Donald Moratz is a Research Manager at the DevLab@Duke and the Department of Political Science at Duke University. His work focuses on the Machine Learning for Peace project and the integration of advanced numerical methods in political science. His substantive areas of interest are in the political economy of development as well as endogenous growth.
This project would not have been possible without the key contributions of Scott de Marchi and Spencer Dorsey. We thank Tim McDade, Akanksha Bhattacharyya, Clara Suong, and Joan Timoneda for earlier work on MLP. We thank Sanjit Beriwal, Jonathan Sandoval, Mike Sun, and Huong Vu for excellent research assistance.