Welcome!

​I am a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of Iowa and was a pre-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Government (the Wesleyan Media Project) and the Quantitative Analysis Center of Wesleyan University in 2019.

My research interests center on political methodology and American politics. Particularly, I am interested in applying supervised, unsupervised, and deep learning techniques to non-traditional data such as text, image, video, and audio. I apply these methods to understand the impact of women and minority representatives on policymaking and gender and racial/ethnic difference in candidates' online campaign strategies. My dissertation examines political rhetoric on criminal justice adopted by legislative candidates in their political ads.​ 
Department of Political Science
341 Schaeffer Hall
Iowa City, Iowa 52242-1409
jielu-yao[at]uiowa[dot]edu