A few updates to share. First, thanks to those of you who made it out to Friday’s roundtable on the first 100 days of the Trump administration. It was fun hearing from the South China Morning Post‘s Bochen Han and Profs. Fredman, Mahon Rathnam, and Rathnam, as well as tackling the questions raised by the audience.
On to the updates. I’d like to announce that two of our labmates, Felipe Silvestri and Jiayi (Joy) Wei, have stepped up to help me manage the many responsibilities of running our burgeoning Lab. Our new Program Coordinators, Felipe and Joy, are both juniors at DKU. This means that they can help to fill out these new roles for the next eight months or so, and then as seniors they can help pass the baton to a new pair of juniors. Felipe is currently at Duke and Joy is currently at DKU, so for now there is someone responsive to each time zone.
Thanks in part to the marketing that went into the kickoff meeting on the 11th, we’ve also received inquiries from several additional students expressing interest in participating in research and possibly joining the Lab. I welcome Wali Ahmed, Annie Trang Ta, Tuong (William) Tran to the listserv and — if they wish — to the Lab. I’ll reiterate here that if you know a friend or two who might be interested (whether in elections per se or in applying some data science knowhow to a new topic), please encourage them to reach out.
A first iteration of the website is available at https://sites.duke.edu/globalelectionslab/. It’s still under construction, and we welcome feedback on how to make it more attractive and more useful. The big thing that’s still missing is the true content: data, visualizations, analyses, papers, etc. Those will come more slowly. The site currently has a mission page (What We Do), an introduction to the team (Who We Are) and various areas of work under way (Where We Work). (The Who We Are page still needs bios and/or photos from five of you!) We’re also working on an Events page, which is more in flux. There you’ll see sketches of two upcoming research talks, by Minh Trinh (Purdue) and Arvind Krishnamurthy (Ohio State). Scheduling is under way, and may supplement (rather than replace) a regular meeting time.
The completion rates for the two Doodles were underwhelming, so I tried my best to pick two times that were approximately two weeks apart and which alternated between AM and PM times (as we discussed). I’m going to follow up with calendar invitations for these dates, while Joy will work to arrange a room at DKU. I expect y’all to have a million other things to do over the summer and attendance to be chaotic. Note that I understand, while hoping to see most of you some of the time and some of you most of the time.
Friday, May 2, 09:00-10:00
Thursday, May 15, 21:00-22:00
Friday, May 30, 09:00-10:00
Thursday, June 12, 21:00-22:00
Friday, June 27, 09:00-10:00
Thursday, July 10, 21:00-22:00
Friday, July 25, 09:00-10:00
Thursday, August 7, 21:00-22:00
Come August, everybody will have a very different schedule, and we’ll have to figure out a new set of regular times.
