Dear Society members and friends,

It is my pleasure to announce that the winner of the Society for Political
Methodology's John T. Williams Dissertation Prize is Dean Knox of MIT.  In
recognition of John T. Williams’s contribution to graduate training, the
prize recognizes the best dissertation proposal in the area of political
methodology in a given year.  Please join me in congratulating Dean.

My thanks to prize committee members Justin Grimmer (Stanford)  and Matt
Blackwell (Harvard).  Their citation for the award follows:

"We are thrilled to select Dean Knox’s dissertation proposal "Essays on
Modeling and Causal Inference in Network Data" for the Williams Prize.
Knox’s dissertation proposal provides new tools for incorporating
networks into several methodological traditions including Bayesian
statistics, causal inference, and machine learning. Along the way,
Knox makes several contributions to political methodology. Notably, he
proposes a novel statistical model for "path data," which is an
entirely new type of dependent variable in political science
research. This model has the potential to answer a large set of
important questions: Does distributive politics influence the paths of
highway networks? How does information flow over social networks? Knox
also develops a sampling algorithm to estimate the parameters of this
model, removing the largest obstacle to inference in this
setting. Knox also applies network reasoning to the estimation of
causal effects. The problem of spillover is well-known and
particularly vexing for researchers interested in estimating causal
effects.  Scholars of networks and computer science have provided
numerous tools for analyzing the structure of networks, but those
tools have not regularly been applied to estimate causal
effects. Knox’s dissertation proposal provides a major attempt at
bridging the two disparate literatures. Knox breaks ground in
introducing new ways of modeling causal effects along a network, new
ways to make minimal assumptions to detect network effects, and
provides excellent applications of the techniques to problems of
interest. In our view the dissertation will represent a major step
forward in incorporating networks into political science research."

A formal presentation of the award will be made at the Methodology
Section's business meeting at APSA (September 2nd at noon).

Best,

Jeff

-- 

Jeffrey B. Lewis
Professor and Chair
Department of Political Science
University of California, Los Angeles
BOX 951472, 4289A Bunche Hall
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1472

President
The Society for Political Methodology

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