Tutor profiles

Spyros Kosmidis (Oxford)

@KosmidisSpyros

Spyros Kosmidis is an Associate Professor in DPIR and Director of the Oxford Spring School in Advanced Methods. Kosmidis's research focuses on social attitudes, voting, political economy and political communication. 

Tom Robinson (LSE)

Tom Robinson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Methodology at the LSE. He is also affiliated with the Centre for Experimental Social Science (CESS) at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. His research interests surround representation, direct democracy and campaign finance, as well as issues within experimental methodology and computational social science.

Vicente Dinis Valentim (Oxford)

@ValentimVicente

Vicente Valentim is Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. He earned his PhD from the European University Institute in 2021. Vicente studies how democracies generate norms against behaviour associated with authoritarianism, how those norms are sustained, and how they erode. He also has a keen interest in political methodology–especially causal inference methods. His work has been published or accepted in journals like the Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, or Comparative Political Studies. It has been awarded the GESIS Klingemann Prize for best CSES Scholarship and the EUI Linz-Rokkan Prize for best thesis in Political Sociology.

Rachel Bernhard (Oxford)

@RIBernhard

Rachel Bernhard is Associate Professor of Quantitative Political Science Research Methods at Nuffield College and the University of Oxford. Before joining Nuffield, she served as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Davis. She holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a Postdoctoral Prize Fellow in Politics at Nuffield. She is currently working on a book project on appearance-based discrimination in politics, and has recently taught classes on political psychology and public policy, identity politics, statistics and research design, women in politics, and computational methods. Before she started graduate school, she worked for a few years in public health and education.

Marnie Howlett (Oxford)

@marnie_howlett

Dr Howlett’s research lies at the nexus of geopolitics, cartography, borders, and nationalism within the former Soviet Union, particularly Ukraine. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in the country analysing the role of borders in shaping grassroots dynamics. Since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war, she has been working on several projects related to Ukrainian nation-building, including running two public opinion surveys in the country. Her main research interests also include the use of visual, spatial, and digital methods for qualitative political science research. She is a Departmental Lecturer in Russian and East European Politics at the University of Oxford. Marnie holds a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), a MA in Political Science, and a BA (High Honours) in International Studies from the University of Saskatchewan. 

Jody LaPorte (Oxford)

@jodylaporte1

Jody LaPorte completed her undergraduate degree at Yale University, and her MA and PhD in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She arrived in Oxford in 2013 to take up an early career post at the Department of Politics and International Relations and St Hilda’s College, followed by two years as a lecturer at the Blavatnik School of Government. She has been at Lincoln College since 2017, where she is the Gonticas Fellow in Politics & International Relations and Director of Studies for PPE. Her research interests fall at the intersection of comparative politics and international relations. Much of her work focuses on the politics of non-democratic regimes, with central attention to the countries of post-Soviet Eurasia. She is interested in how domestic and foreign pressures—including patterns of corruption, the legacies of communism, and contemporary human rights norms—shape political outcomes. In addition to these substantive issues, she is also active in the field of political science research methods, where her recent publications seek to develop new tools for using qualitative data to make causal claims.

Tom O'Grady (UCL)

 @DrTomD_OG

Tom O'Grady is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at UCL, where he teaches on the interdisciplinary QStep Program in quantitative methods for the social sciences. His research focuses on political economy, political behaviour and political parties in the UK and Europe.