Matthew Denny (Facebook) and Natalie Jackson (PRRI)

Matthew Denny is a research scientist at Facebook, and an adjunct professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at
Georgetown University. The substantive focus of his work centers on the study of Congress, state and local bureaucracy, and organizational dynamics, through the use of computational social science methods. In service of this research agenda, he focuses on developing and implementing machine learning algorithms for analyzing social processes. He has a particular interest in developing new statistical models for text, networks, and text-valued networks. He has also worked as a data scientist at Skopos Labs, and cofounded Cerenetics, Inc. From 2013–2015, he was a statistical methods consultant for the Institute for Social Science Research at UMass Amherst.

Natalie Jackson has held senior and management positions in media, academia, and nonprofit organizations. Most recently, she was the managing director of polling at JUST Capital, where she has built and managed a survey research team, as well as contributed to the overall mission and strategy of the nonprofit organization. Natalie received her doctorate in political science from the University of Oklahoma and was a postdoctoral associate at the Duke University Initiative on Survey Methodology. Her work has appeared in the peer-reviewed journals Electoral Studies and Social Science Quarterly, as well as in several edited volumes.