The Polarization Research Lab Welcomes New Postdoctoral Fellow

The Polarization Research Lab (PRL), a joint research group of the Annenberg School, Dartmouth College, and Stanford University, is excited to announce that Erin Walk will join the Lab as a postdoctoral fellow starting this July.

Walk holds a Ph.D. in Social and Engineering Systems from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work focuses on ways in which the internet has impacted traditional forms of political expression and attitude formation. Drawing upon literature from communications, ethnic studies, and conflict theory, she uses internet data, primarily from social media, to extract information about individuals and attitudes that may otherwise be difficult to maintain contact with or measure. She is also interested in the limitations and biases inherent in novel data and data processing techniques. 

At the Annenberg School, Walk will work with Associate Professor Yphtach Lelkes, co-director of PRL.

“We are thrilled to have Erin at PRL," Lelkes says. "Her interdisciplinary and computational background will be a huge asset to our ongoing work on democratic attitudes and elite behavior."

Walk's work has been featured in World Development and WWW’23 and is forthcoming in The Journal of Politics. She was formerly a Graduate Fellow at MIT’s Global Diversity Lab, a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, and supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program as well as a World Bank grant. Prior to receiving her Ph.D., Walk was a Policy Analyst at Cloudflare where she worked on corporate social responsibility projects.