Cali Mortenson Ellis

I am a PhD Candidate in Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Michigan. I have an undergraduate degree in economics and a master's degree in public policy.

Interests

As a policy student and former practitioner, all of my interests are applied:

Topics
International Relations, specifically quantitative conflict studies
Civilian casualties in war (conflict epidemiology)
Military strategy and tactics, esp. counterinsurgency
Homeland security, critical infrastructure protection and emergency management
Prediction markets
Applied ethics

Tools
Applied statistics and econometrics
Design of experiments
Behavioral economics
Crowdsourcing
Survey research
Quantification of historical archives
Social network analysis (including sociological approaches)
Topic modeling <-New to me, would love help with this

Pie in the Sky
Nobody knows how many people actually die in any given war. My dream project is to combine survey research in Afghanistan and Pakistan with epidemiological models to develop more accurate, unclassified tools for determining how many civilians are killed by modern munitions. This idea originally came from observing the use of Hellfire missiles from drone platforms, which seem to conveniently kill terrorists 30 at a time. PDF warning.

It should come as no surprise that this project probably is not going to happen anytime soon.

Expertise

It sounds pedestrian, but my professional background working a) on a political campaign; b) as a political appointee in an executive office and; c) for the military in the homeland security field have come in handy just as often as my school-based training. That said, I can do some stuff:

Econometrics
Survey research methods
Program evaluation
Prediction markets
Experimental political science
Game theory
I heart Stata, but I also use R

What I hope to get out of CSSS

As I am in a joint program myself, I get a lot out of talking to people in other disciplines and seeing where we can forge partnerships and find learning opportunities. I am listening closely to everything with the thought of how I can use this in an applied public policy context.

Projects

I heard about Stats Monkey at a journalism conference and think it is really cool with many potential applications other than sports. Unfortunately, the people involved have not published anything about it. If anyone knows anything about it, how it works, and how to use it in other contexts, I would love to talk.