The series

For Trinity Term we are focussing on research methods. The aim of these sessions is really to excite an interdisciplinary audience of graduates to understand how different methods are being used creatively across the social sciences. The panel discussions will be held during the first four weeks of term and will focus on ‘interviews’ in week 1, ‘numbers’ (quant methods) in week 2, ‘archives’ in week 3, and ‘ethnogrpahy’ in week 4.

Panellists:
Ben Ansell is Professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions in the Department of Politics and International Relations and Professorial Fellow, Nuffield College. He received his PhD in Government from Harvard University in 2006 and conducts research in a wide area of comparative politics and political economy.

Jenn Dowd is a quantitative social and health scientist with interdisciplinary training in demography, economics, epidemiology and infectious disease. Her research seeks to understand how social and biological processes interact over the life course and how social factors “get under the skin” to impact health. She has studied how socioeconomic status shapes immune function and risk of infections as well as links between infections and chronic diseases of aging. On-going projects include understanding the social determinants of the human microbiome and the causes of stalling life expectancy in the US and UK.

Maximilian Kasy is an associate professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Oxford. Previously, he was an associate professor at the Department of Economics at Harvard University as well as at the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics and an MA in Statistics from UC Berkeley. His research interests include machine learning theory, the social impact of algorithmic decision making, publication bias, pre-analysis plans, and statistics as a social process, adaptive experimental design, identification and causality, and economic inequality and (optimal) taxation.