Sina Shaikh

Hi, I'm Sina! I will be starting a Ph.D. in Political Science and Statistics at MIT this fall.

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 my section in a chess tournament
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 attending SPSA, ESRA, POLMETH and possibly 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

A Two-Phase Algorithm for Optimal Quota Sampling

With Bailey Flanigan and Melody Huang

Code & Data

Iterated Election Data Scraping [Code] [Output]

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 [Read]

Cited in The Atlantic and Philadelphia Magazine

Penn, in Washington: the numbers behind 200 years of alumni, affiliates in Congress [Read]

Who are Penn's most-cited researchers? Here's what the DP found. [Read]

CIS 110 · University of Pennsylvania

Teaching Assistant — Introduction to Computer Programming

Introductory OCaml and Java.

GAFL 5310 · University of Pennsylvania

Teaching Assistant — Data Science for Public Policy

Graduate course on the R Shiny framework, statistics, and mapping.

CRIM 4012 · University of Pennsylvania

Tutor — Machine Learning for Social Science

Introduction to supervised and unsupervised learning, deep learning, and natural language processing.

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