About

Christopher Schwarz is a Research Data Scientist at NYU's Center for Social Media and Politics.  Schwarz received his Ph.D. from NYU's Wilf Family Department of Politics in May 2024, his doctoral research being focused on formal theoretic materialist explanations for war and philosophy of science.  His current interests include the measurement of ideology from text and speech, the spread of information and propaganda on social networks, and statistical learning theory.

In his doctoral research, Chris studied microfoundations for context conditional risk preference as a rationalist explanation for war.  It was shown such explanations can explain, with a small set of closely related models, at least 28 previously theoretically disconnected empirical findings from the literature.  These applied results were paired with a broad philosophical analysis of the theoretical and empirical crises faced by International Relations as a field of study, their solution within a materialist philosophy of science, and a study of the historical development of attitudes towards big-t Theory in International Relations.

While pursuing his first Masters degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he had the privilege of attending the ICPSR Summer Program on an EITM Certification Scholarship (2015).  The experience was formative for his research agenda and he had the pleasure of returning to the University of Michigan for a number of summers as a teaching assistant for advanced courses in multilevel modeling, regression, and classification which straddled the divide between machine learning and causal inference (2016-2022) .

You can get a hold of Chris at cschwarz[at]nyu.edu