Our team

Co-founders

Jae Yeon Kim is an incoming Assistant Professor of Public Policy at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is currently a research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and the Better Government Lab Fellow at the University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy. Before returning to academia, he worked as a senior data scientist at the Safety Net Innovations lab at Code for America. He also held a position as an Assistant Research Scientist at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where he co-developed the Mapping the Modern Agora Project. He applies social science research and data science skills to improve access to safety net programs and strengthen civic health and democracy.

Kayla Schwoerer is an Assistant Professor of Public Administration in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam. Her research focuses broadly on public and nonprofit management, with a particular focus on issues related to technology and citizen-state interactions from a behavioral science perspective. Kayla is also the founder and director of the GovDX Lab, which is a formal research group dedicated to investigating how digital technologies are reshaping interactions between government institutions, nonprofits, and the public.

Nari Yoo is an Assistant Professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan. She was a predoctoral fellow at the NYU Constance and Martin Silver Center on Data Science and Social Equity, and she organized the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS) at NYU, which focused on computational social science for social equity. Her research applies computational methods, particularly natural language processing, to analyze equitable service access and provision in behavioral health settings.

Soubhik (sho-bik) Barari is a quantitative social scientist at NORC at the University of Chicago and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University. He works on a range of areas at the intersection of survey research and data science including the incorporation of generative AI into survey practice, diagnosing weights for election polls, and building an alternative to U.S. college rankings. His academic research has focused primarily on political communication and public opinion, although these days most of his writing is for a public audience on Substack. He has previously worked in both research and data science roles at SurveyMonkey and Microsoft Research.

Tyler Simko is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. He researches US state and local public policy, with a particular focus on political geography, spatial inequality, and computational social science. He has worked at the Office of Evaluation Sciences — an interdisciplinary team that works across the US federal government to help agencies build and use evidence. Tyler regularly partners with federal, state, and local public agencies to evaluate and improve policy design. Before graduate school, he served as the President of the South Amboy Board of Education in New Jersey. 

Graduate student coordinator 

Jose Aguilar is doctoral student and Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System (CRELS) Fellow in the Policy, Politics, and Leadership program at UC Berkeley’s School of Education. His research explores Latine post-secondary access, computational social science, big data, and artificial intelligence in education policy. Using computational methods, Jose investigates the factors influencing college readiness education policy-making and policies, access and equity for Latinx students, and students’ career pathways. As an emerging scholar in artificial intelligence and educational policy, he seeks to ensure that technological advancements equitably include the voices and needs of historically marginalized communities.