Hi, I'm Sina! I am a first year Ph.D. student at MIT studying Political Science and Statistics. I am advised by Ariel White.

I am interested in studying how computational techniques can be applied to study elections and political communication. I'm also interested in building new datasets and making existing ones more usable. For more details on my past work, see Research.

Over the past few years, I:

Studied elections and built datasets at the MIT Elections Lab
Worked for the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
Reported on elections for NBC and made graphics for the 13th sexiest man alive
Interned at the Brookings Institution
Graduated Summa Cum Laude from Penn with a BSE in CS
Won chess, soccer, and mock trial tournaments.
Read and ate as much as possible

I do my best work with others and am always looking for new collaborators. In 2026 I will be presenting at SPSA, ESRA, and POLMETH and attending APSA. I live in Boston and you can reach me at sinas100 at mit.edu.

In Progress

Why the Wait? Preprocessing, Mail Ballot Usage, and Vote Reporting Dynamics in the 2020 and 2024 Elections (working paper)

With Charles Stewart III (presentation at ESRA 2025 and SPSA 2026)

Code & Data

County Level Presidential Election Results (data)

Precinct Level Election Results (data)

Elections Performance Index (data, explore)

Described as prestigious by states which ranked highly

Selected Articles

50% of full-time jobs among recent Penn grads are in finance and consulting, DP analysis finds (story)

Cited in The Atlantic and Philadelphia Magazine

Penn, in Washington: the numbers behind 200 years of alumni, affiliates in Congress (story)

Who are Penn's most-cited researchers? Here's what the DP found. (story)

University of Pennsylvania

CIS 110: Teaching Assistant, Introduction to Computer Programming (introductory OCaml and Java)
GAFL 5310: Teaching Assistant, Data Science for Public Policy (graduate course on the R Shiny framework, statistics, and mapping)
CRIM 4012: Tutor, Machine Learning for Social Science (supervised and unsupervised learning, deep learning, and natural language processing)

Sword-Billed Hummingbird

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