Adeline Lo

Adeline Lo studies how conflict and cooperation between groups impacts politics, especially the politics of migration. She developed her passion for this work at the end of college, during an internship with the International Rescue Committee. Interviewing asylum applicants and building cases for their resettlement in the U.S. showed her how much there is to learn about the political and socioeconomic factors surrounding migration.

Hearing migrants’ stories and taking on their perspectives can warm people to newcomers. Lo studies the impacts of these kinds of interventions, as well as the media’s representation of refugees. Her methods combine data science techniques for analyzing media data, such as convolutional neural networks for TV images, with randomized field projects and surveys. Through this work, she has learned that people’s emotional responses to interventions are important for their success.

Lo designs statistical tools to work with “odd, complicated, and messy” data, and she has created open-source R packages for social scientists. In recent decades, there has been a concerted push to make scientific research as transparent and replicable as possible. Lo believes that open-source resources such as computing and analysis packages can ease the effort of interrogating data and improving on existing work.

“Political science questions and data are inherently and inextricably related to statistics and empirical approaches. This is a major reason why UW–Madison is such an exciting place to work. The campus is overflowing with social science scholars and data-driven scientists who are incredibly open-minded to cross-disciplinary collaboration.”