Joanne Rodrigues

I am a first-year PhD student in political science at UC Berkeley. My passion is to explore the interconnection between political processes and demographic phenomenon particularly fertility and mortality. Little scholarly work has been done to bridge the gap between concepts in demography such as the demographic transition and stable population theory with comparative political processes such as regime stability, political transitions and political protest. In particular, my long run research goal is to integrate demographic and geographic factors to create spatial models of political protest and violence.

I obtained my undergraduate from Georgetown University’s Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service in International Political Economy, an MSc in Applicable Mathematics from the London School of Economics, and am currently finishing MAs from University of California Berkeley in both Demography and Political Science. My areas of expertise are probably demographic methods, political science and algorithms/algorithmic game theory.

I’m looking forward to the exchange of ideas and to interact with excellent faculty and graduate students from a wide variety of disciplines and institutions from around the world. It will be exciting to see how other participants use algorithmic approaches to model different types of phenomenon.