Ryan Enos, Assistant Professor of Government at Harvard College and a faculty associate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science

Ryan D. Enos is an assistant professor of government and a faculty associate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. He specializes in American politics with an emphasis on the politics of race & identity and voting behavior. His research focuses on how voting and other political behavior is affected by the context in which a person lives interacting with their identity. This leads him to an intersection of research in political behavior, political psychology, and geography. His current primary interest is in the effect of residential racial segregation on voter choice and participation. He earned his AB in political science and history from U.C. Berkeley and his MA and PhD in political science from UCLA. Before entering academia, he was a teacher at Paul Robeson High School in Chicago, IL.

Research Assistant Skills
Professor Enos will be conducting research on intergroup attitudes - primarily about how racial attitudes affect how individuals vote.  This will involve looking at cities, neighborhoods, and individuals.  Together, you will look at existing data and possibly prepare and conduct experiments.  Good organizational skills and hard work are a must - a plus are computer programming skills.

2012 Research Assistant Reflections:

Although the semester is concluding, my work with Professor Enos only seems to be ramping up. It has been really great working for him - he is very quick, smart, and seems to know the right kind of work to assign to an RA. The past month or so I have been working with Professor Enos and the rest of his research team on designing a field experiment to be run this summer looking at racial attitudes towards Hispanics in the context of immigration policy and the upcoming election. Professor Enos has had me looking at logistical challenges, like who and how to hire confederates and survey administrators, how to track them geographically, and research on the MBTA commuter rail stations where the experiment will be run using GIS data. We are currently in the process of drawing up a scheme for the treatment and control groups before randomization. I am now working close to the 10 hour per week maximum, and meeting with Professor Enos and some of the other researchers at least once a week.

-Alexander Sahn ‘13

This project has been particularly fun because I am working with two other undergrad RA's. Each week we all meet with Professor Enos to check in on our individual progress (my individual task has been literature review, while the other tewo have been focusing on logistics). My favorite part about the RA job so far are these meetings. It is fascinating and exciting to watch an experiment be built from the ground-up, and the meetings with Enos are truly collaborative, with all of us pitching ideas about how to better run the experiment.

Andrew Blinkinsop ‘13