Molly Offer-Westort

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I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at The University of Chicago. I also have affiliations with the Department of Statistics, the Committee on Data Science, and the PhD program in political economy.

My work on statistical methodology for social science research integrates machine learning methods with experimental design to answer causal questions. I also have an ongoing substantive research program that examines online behavior to understand how people change their views and attitudes in response to the conversations they take part in and the information they engage with online. I combine these agendas in social media experiments, using approaches like adaptive assignment and policy learning, and incorporating natural language processing methods for flexible conversational interventions.

For “Battling the coronavirus ‘infodemic’ among social media users in Kenya and Nigeria”, published in Nature Human Behaviour, (co-authored with Leah Rosenzweig and Susan Athey) I designed a contextual adaptive experiment to identify the most effective interventions for curbing the spread of misinformation online.

Along with Leah Rosenzweig, I was awarded a Vaccine Confidence Fund grant to study how social media platforms can facilitate the dissemination of public health information. For this project, we used a partitioned but non-contextual adaptive experimental design to efficiently learn the best messaging for as-yet unvaccinated social media users in Kenya and Nigeria, conditional on the concerns they had about the COVID-19 vaccine. Our working paper describes our study design and results.

My research has been supported by The University of Chicago’s Data & Democracy Research Initiative. With Nick Feamster I have worked on developing tools and study designs for more flexible digital experiments. Under this project, I am working with Isaac Mehlhaff on a study on coordination and persuasion in online discourse.

Previously, I was a post-doctoral fellow in Susan Athey’s Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. My PhD is from Yale, joint in Political Science and Statistics & Data Science; I have a Masters degree in Public Affairs from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs; and my undergraduate degree is from Grinnell College.

After college, I spent a fellowship year in Lesotho, and two years in Madagascar as a Peace Corps volunteer. Prior to my PhD, I worked on policy research for several years in West Africa with the World Bank and the United Nations.