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Kirk Bansak | UC Berkeley Political Science
Profile picture for user Kirk Bansak

Kirk Bansak

Associate Professor
Email
[email protected]
Website
Personal Website
Office
736 Social Sciences Building
Personal Statement

Professor Bansak's research interests are in causal inference, experimental design and analysis, refugee resettlement and asylum politics, algorithmic decision-making, and public opinion. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in Science, Nature, American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, Statistical Science, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A, Nature Human Behaviour, PNAS Nexus, Political Science Research and Methods, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Operations Research, International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES), and ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC). He is the inaugural Faculty Director of the Yardi Scholarship at UC Berkeley, a faculty affiliate of the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University and ETH Zurich, and a faculty affiliate of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI).

Professor Bansak's CV can be found here.

Academic Subfields
Methodology & Formal Theory
Degrees
Ph.D., Political Science, Stanford (2019)
M.S., Statistics, Stanford (2017)
M.A.L.D., Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts (2013)
A.B., Anthropology, Harvard (2009)
Articles

Google Scholar Profile

Teaching

Undergraduate

  • Berkeley Changemaker: Algorithms, Public Policy, and Ethics [POLSCI 132C]
  • Machine Learning for Social Scientists [POLSCI 132B]
  • Building Bridges between Democracy and Technology for a Better Society [POLSCI C193A / ENGIN C183F] (course co-designer)

Graduate

  • Quantitative Analysis in Political Research II (Causal Inference) [POLSCI 231B]
  • Quantitative Analysis in Political Research III (Model-Based Inference) [POLSCI 231C]
Exchange of Ideas

In uncertain times, these UC Berkeley students are using tech to innovate democratic processes, Berkeley News, May 14, 2025.

As refugees surge, European voters show ‘resilient’ support, study finds, Berkeley News, August 9, 2023.

Other

Inaugural Faculty Director, Yardi Scholarship, UC Berkeley, 2023 - Present.

Editorial Board, Political Analysis, 2025 - Present.

Placement Director, Political Science Department, UC Berkeley, 2024 - Present.

Faculty Affiliate, Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), UC Berkeley, 2022 - Present.

Faculty Affiliate, Immigration Policy Lab (IPL), Stanford University and ETH Zurich, 2019 - Present.