Michael Neblo is Associate Professor of Political Science and (by courtesy) Philosophy, and Public Policy at The Ohio State University, where he also directs the Institute for Democratic Engagement & Accountability (IDEA). His research focuses on deliberative democracy and political psychology. Neblo’s first book, Deliberative Democracy between Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2015), cuts across the deadlock between supporters of deliberative theory and their empirical critics by focusing on the core goals of the larger deliberative political system. His work has appeared in a wide range of academic journals, including Science, The American Political Science Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, The Journal of Political Philosophy, Political Analysis, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Behavior, Political Research Quarterly, Perspectives on Politics, Political Communication, and Social Networks, among others. Neblo has received awards and fellowships from the Kettering Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Veterans Administration, the International Society for Political Psychology, the Ash Institute, and the National Science Foundation. He earned his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in Philosophy and Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences (MMSS) from Northwestern University.
Kevin Esterling is Professor of Public Policy and Political Science, and Director of the Center for Technology, Communication and Democracy at the University of California, Riverside. His current work identifies the conditions that lead citizens to engage constructively in public discourse. He is the author of The Political Economy of Expertise: Information and Efficiency in American National Politics (University of Michigan Press, 2004). He has published in a number of journals, including Science, The Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, The American Political Science Review, Political Analysis, The Journal of Politics, Rationality and Society, Political Communication, and the Journal of Theoretical Politics. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and by the MacArthur Foundation. Esterling was previously a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of California, Berkeley and a postdoctoral research fellow at the A. Alfred Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions at Brown University. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago in 1999.
David Lazer is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University, and Co-Director, NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. Prior to coming to Northeastern University, he was on the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School (1998-2009). His research has been published in such journals as Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the American Political Science Review, Organization Science, and the Administrative Science Quarterly, and has received extensive coverage in the media, including the New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CBS Evening News. He is lead author of the paper in Science in 2014 that critiqued Google Flu Trends, which has emerged as an important piece in the use of big data to understand human behavior. He is lead author on the 2009 Science paper on computational social science, which has been described as the manifesto for the emerging field. His work on online personalization has received wide media coverage. His online experimental work on deliberation garnered best paper of the year in the American Political Science Review. His research on exploration and exploitation has been highly cited within the literature on collective intelligence. He has been PI on more than $12m of grants from various government agencies and foundations. Dr. Lazer serves in multiple leadership and editorial positions, including as a board member for the International Network of Social Network Analysts (INSNA), reviewing editor for Science, associate editor of Social Networks and Network Science, numerous other editorial boards and program committees. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan.