I am very pleased to announce that Drew Dimmery is the winner of the Society for Political Methodology’s 2015 Williams Award. In recognition of John T. Williams’ contribution to graduate training, the John T. Williams Award has been established for the best dissertation proposal in the area of political methodology.   Drew’s dissertation proposal titled “Essays on Machine Learning and Causal Inference with Application to Nonprofits”. Please join me in congratulating Drew on this prestigious honor. 

The citation from the award committee (Curt Signorino (chair), John Ahlquist, and Jennifer Jerit) is the following:

We are pleased to announce that this year’s Williams Award goes to Drew Dimmery.  Dimmery is a graduate student at NYU and an advisee of Neal Beck, Cyrus Samii, and Josh Tucker.  

Dimmery addresses an interesting and important substantive issue:  nonprofit organizations inject a huge amount of funding into the political process through issue advocacy, yet we know relatively little about how they do so or what motivates individuals to participate on their behalf — e.g., by donating money or forwarding a tweet.  Dimmery’s dissertation research involves a number of projects related to this issue.  However, the main methodological innovation is in applying a multi-armed bandit approach to experimental design in order to allow for adaptive treatment regimes.  This is particularly useful in cases like Dimmery’s, where there are many possible treatments (e.g., types of appeals) under investigation.  Dimmery’s method allows for the experiment to be altered in real time, with no human intervention, based on observed responses.  This has the potential to greatly reduce sample sizes needed to determine which of many possible treatments have a statistically significant effect.


Please join me in thanking the award committee as well as the many individuals who submitted nominations for this award. 


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Kevin Quinn
Professor of Law
UC Berkeley School of Law
490 Simon #7200
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA  94720-7200
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President 
The Society for Political Methodology
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