About

I am a Research Data Scientist at NYU's Center for Social Media and Politics and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Management and Organization Department at NYU's Stern School for Business where I teach undergraduate and graduate level game theory. 

I received my Ph.D. from NYU's Wilf Family Department of Politics in May 2024, my doctoral research being focused on formal theoretic materialist explanations for war and philosophy of science.  My current interests include the measurement of ideology from text and speech, the spread of information and propaganda on social networks, and topics related to AI safety, alignment, and unlearning.

When not writing web scrapers, fine-tuning LLMs, and working with massive data pipelines in general support of the CSMaP research agenda, my time at CSMaP is devoted to the pursuit of funding opportunities from partners in industry, government, and the non-profit sector to advance evidence based policy, fundamental social science research, and improving civic health.

In my doctoral research, I developed microfoundations for context conditional risk preference as a rationalist explanation for war.  It was shown such explanations can formally explain, with a small set of closely related models, at least 28 previously theoretically disconnected empirical findings from the empirical 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 my first Masters degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, I had the privilege of attending the ICPSR Summer Program on an EITM Certification Scholarship (2015).  The experience was formative for my research agenda and I 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 me at cschwarz[at]nyu.edu