Professor Montgomery's research focuses on how to use advanced methods from statistics and computer science for core social science tasks including measurement and theory testing with a special focus on American politics and (more recently) social media.
Jacob Montgomery is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis and chair of the political science track for the newly formed Division of Computational and Data Sciences, and director of the Weidenbaum Center's The American Social Survey (TASS). His research is in the areas of political methodology and American politics, with a special interest in measurement, network analysis, Bayesian statistics, and computational methods. He is currently working on understanding the role of social media platforms in the political system including interventions to reduce belief in disinformation, the role of algorithms in targeting online political advertisements, and applying machine learning techniques to the task of measuring political concepts.
He has published in many of the field's leading journals—including the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and Political Analysis—and his work has received support from the National Science Foundation. He earned a bachelor of arts from Wake Forest University in political science and mathematical economics. At Duke University, he earned a master of science in statistical science and his doctorate in political science.
