Hello!
I am a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Toronto. I work primarily with quantitative methods applied to unstructured data, such as text content and audio. I also work with conventional data from opinion surveys and electoral datasets. My substantive interests are in studying public discontentment and disengagement from politics, political ideologies, economic ideas in public policy, and emotions and psychological processes as they relate to politics. The case studies in my dissertation are Canada and the UK, and I work at times with data from France, Ireland, Australia, and the US. My dissertation project studies how fringe or outsider politicians (some might say ‘populists’) communicate with the public, compared to how more mainstream politicians do.
Prior to starting my PhD, I worked in policy development in the Ontario Public Service. I also have been involved with a long-running empirical economics project on water markets, run by Prof. Dustin Garrick of the University of Oxford and University of Waterloo (https://www.bluerangelabs.org/). More recently, I have engaged in survey data analysis and report/paper writing with emeritus Prof. Neil Nevitte at the University of Toronto, as well as research assistantships involving web scraping and text analysis for Prof. Randy Besco, and dataset development for a machine learning project on using audio and video image to detect emotional states with Prof. Ludovic Rheault, both at the University of Toronto. My dissertation committee members are Prof. Christopher Cochrane (supervisor), Prof. Ludovic Rheault, and Prof. Michael Donnelly.
I am also passionate about teaching statistics and the practicalities of coding (R, Python) and quantitative data analysis. I have taught my department’s undergraduate introduction to statistical methods, POL222 Introduction to Quantitative Reasoning I, in 2022. I have also undergone additional training in methods at the University of Michigan’s Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research in 2020, 2021, and 2022, and worked as a Teaching Assistant for their graduate ‘Data Science and Text Analysis’ course in 2022. I have worked as a teaching assistant in several other graduate and undergraduate methods courses in my department, as well.
As of summer 2023, I am currently looking for postdoctoral research opportunities (studying political disaffection and the drivers of support for fringe/populist movements and leaders), as well as longer-term positions in Canadian Politics, quantitative methods teaching, and/or Comparative Politics.
Thank you for taking a look at my site. Please feel free to get in touch to discuss any potential job opportunities or research collaborations, at catherine.moez[@]mail.utoronto.ca.