Bio

I am an Associate Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations (opens in new tab) at University College Dublin (opens in new tab). My research focuses on political representation, party competition, political communication, public opinion, and quantitative text analysis. My work has been published, among others, in the American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, Political Communication, the European Journal of Political Research, and Political Science Research and Methods.

I lead four funded research projects. The first examines environmental and energy policies across multiple countries as part of the multidisciplinary energy research programme NexSys (opens in new tab). The second, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (opens in new tab), uses computational text analysis and machine learning to analyse grant peer review reports. My third project, the Irish Polling Indicator (opens in new tab), collects and aggregates public opinion polls to estimate likely support ranges for Irish parties, and was selected as a Finalist for the 2025 UCD Impact Case Study Competition (opens in new tab). The fourth project, Democracy and AI (opens in new tab), is funded by Una Europa (opens in new tab) and examines the risks and opportunities that generative artificial intelligence poses for democracy.

I am a core member of the Connected_Politics Lab (opens in new tab) and co-author of the quanteda (opens in new tab) R package for quantitative text analysis. I was selected by the Royal Irish Academy to join the Young Academy Ireland (YAI) (opens in new tab) and serve on the YAI Executive Committee. I established the Text and Policy Research Group (opens in new tab) and regularly comment on Irish and European politics in the national and international media.