Research, teaching,
and community for
social scientists.

Maksim Zubok is a doctoral candidate in Politics at Oxford University, Nuffield College. His dissertation explores ways of harnessing LLMs for social science research, from classic data labelling to using models as condensed snapshots of the internet to study how people organise relationships between concepts and form beliefs about the world.

He conceived and organised the inaugural school in 2023 and has led the programme through each edition since. He has also helped organise the Oxford Summer Institute for Computational Social Science.

Ilya is a member of the ML Performance Engineering team at Nebius, where he works on large-scale LLM inference systems and performance optimization. His interests include efficient transformer architectures, distributed inference infrastructure, and scalable serving of foundation models, with a particular focus on Mixture-of-Experts architectures.

Josh's research combines insights from computational social science, behavioural economics, and networks to study political economy, regulatory enforcement, and judicial systems in advanced democratic countries. More broadly, he is interested in developing experimental, machine learning, and computational methodologies for social science research.

Elodie Chervin is a DPhil candidate in Economics at Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

Rachel Bernhard is Associate Professor of Quantitative Political Science Research Methods at Nuffield College and the University of Oxford. Before joining Nuffield, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis, and a Postdoctoral Prize Fellow in Politics at Nuffield. She holds a PhD from UC Berkeley.

Her research focuses on appearance-based discrimination in politics — how candidate appearance shapes voter preferences and how parties select candidates. She is also a methodologist working on survey experiments and text-as-data approaches.

Humeyra Biricik is a doctoral candidate in Politics at Pembroke College, Oxford. Her research focuses on political speech, populism, and democratic backsliding in Turkey, Hungary, India, and Arabic-speaking Middle Eastern countries, using large language models and text analysis alongside econometric methods.

She also coordinates a series of politics talks at Pembroke College on topics ranging from local British elections and the housing crisis to AI regulation and machine learning in political science.