Bruce Desmarais

Professional Bio

Bruce is the DeGrandis-McCourtney Early Career Professor in Political Science, Associate Director of the Center for Social Data Analytics, and an Affiliate of the Institute for Cyber Science at Penn State University. His research is focused on methodological development and applications that further our understanding of the complex interdependence that underlies politics, policymaking, and public administration. Methodologically, Bruce focuses on methods for modeling networks, analyzing dynamics on networks, and experiments on networks. Primary application areas of interest to Bruce include public policy diffusion, campaign finance, legislative networks, and internal government communication networks.

Professor Desmarais holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2010) and a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from Eastern Connecticut State University (2005). Prior to coming to Penn State, he was Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and an Affiliate of the Computational Social Science Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (2010-2015).