William Brannon
PhD candidate
Will is a fourth-year PhD student in the Social and Engineering Systems program, and an RA at LSM. He’s interested in the intersection of media ecosystems, causal inference and natural language processing. In the spirit of Marshall McLuhan’s adage that “the medium is the message”, he is currently excited about understanding how different media differ in their effects on the spread of ideas.
He received a BS in mathematics and international relations from the College of William and Mary. Between undergrad and starting at MIT, he spent several years working in data science and software engineering roles for political campaigns and organizations. He’s run and/or analyzed a large number of field experiments and has spent more time than is really healthy working with voter registration data. (He also has a bunch of weird + funny stories from knocking on voters’ doors that he’d be happy to tell you.)
He really enjoys reading (fiction and non-fiction, lately more of the latter). He’s been meaning to get more into swimming— i.e., learn to do more than stay above water—for a while now, and is still working on it.
