I am the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. My research, which focuses on misperceptions about politics and health care, has been published in journals including Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Nature Human Behaviour, Pediatrics, and Vaccine. I was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023 and previously was named a Guggenheim Fellow by the Guggenheim Foundation, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and a Belfer Fellow by the Anti-Defamation League. I also received the Emerging Scholar Award for the top scholar in the field within 10 years of their Ph.D. by the American Political Science Association's section on Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior.
I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Duke University and previously served as a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research and Professor of Public Policy at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.
I am a co-director of Bright Line Watch, a watchdog group that monitors the status of American democracy. I was previously a contributor to The Upshot at The New York Times and GEN/Medium and a media critic for Columbia Journalism Review. You can follow my public commentary on politics and the media on Blue Sky or Threads or on my blog, where I post updates on new public-facing interviews and articles.
Previously, I was a founder and editor of Spinsanity, a non-partisan watchdog of political spin that was syndicated in Salon and the Philadelphia Inquirer, along with Ben Fritz and Bryan Keefer. Together we co-authored All the President's Spin, a New York Times bestseller that Amazon named one of the best political books of 2004. Before graduate school, I worked a marketing and fundraising consultant for Benetech, a Silicon Valley technology nonprofit, and as Deputy Communications Director of the Bernstein for US Senate campaign in Nevada.