Professor Montgomery's research focuses on how to use advanced methods from statistics and computer science for core social science tasks including measurement and theory testing with a special focus on American politics and (more recently) social media.
Jacob Montgomery is a Professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. He develops advanced statistical and computational methods for the social sciences and applies them to public opinion, political behavior, and political communication. His methodological work focuses on AI and machine learning, Bayesian methods, and text and image analysis. Substantively, his recent work focuses on how technology shapes democratic politics, including artificial intelligence, social media, online political advertising, misinformation, and online populism.
He has received multiple awards, including the Warren Miller Prize and the Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Political Methodology, and has published over 40 papers in peer-reviewed outlets, including leading journals such as PNAS, the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and Political Analysis, as well as premier computer science venues such as NeurIPS, FAccT, and IMC. This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Democracy Fund, with total external funding exceeding $1.2 million.
He received his PhD in Political Science and MS in Statistical Sciences from Duke University, and his BA in Mathematical Economics and Political Science from Wake Forest University. He has also served as Founding Director of the Transdisciplinary Institute in Applied Data Sciences (2022–2024) and currently serves as Vice President of the Society for Political Methodology.
