Hello! I'm a computational social scientist and an assistant professor in Operations, Information, and Decisions at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. I study topics ranging from policing to causal inference and machine learning. My work uses many forms of data previously thought to be too messy or unstructured to study, such as audiovisual data conveying human emotion.
I am an Andrew Carnegie Fellow and the inaugural recipient of Science's NOMIS early career award for interdisciplinary research. My research has appeared or is forthcoming in Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and the American Political Science Review. It has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Microsoft, and Facebook. It also received the Gosnell Prize for excellence in political methodology, the John T. Williams dissertation prize, and the best poster award by the Society for Political Methodology.
Please visit policingresearch.org for work by my group, Research on Policing Reform and Accountability, co-founded with Jonathan Mummolo. I am also a faculty fellow at Analytics at Wharton and an affiliate of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice.
Dean Knox. 2021. "Revealing Racial Bias: Causal Inference Can Make Sense of Messy Policing Data." Science (Essay).
DownloadDean Knox, Christopher Lucas, and Wendy K. Tam Cho. Conditionally accepted. "Testing Causal Theories with Learned Proxies. Annual Review of Political Science (Invited).
DownloadFotini Christia, Elizabeth Dekeyser, and Dean Knox. Forthcoming. "Evidence on the Nature of Sectarian Animosity: The Shi‘a Case." Nature Human Behavior (Article).
DownloadDean Knox and Christopher Lucas. 2021. "A Dynamic Model of Speech for the Social Sciences." American Political Science Review (Manuscript).
DownloadBocar Ba, Dean Knox, Jonathan Mummolo, and Roman Rivera. 2021. "The Role of Officer Race and Gender in Police-Civilian Interactions in Chicago." Science (Research Article).
DownloadDean Knox, Will Lowe, and Jonathan Mummolo. 2020. "Administrative Records Mask Racially Biased Policing." American Political Science Review (Manuscript).
DownloadDean Knox and Jonathan Mummolo. 2020. "Toward a General Causal Framework for the Study of Racial Bias in Policing." Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy (Invited).
DownloadFragile Families Challenge Team. 2020. "Measuring the predictability of life outcomes with a scientific mass collaboration." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Research Report).
DownloadDean Knox and Jonathan Mummolo. 2020. "Making inferences about racial disparities in police violence." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Letter).
DownloadSamuel Mehr, Manvir Singh, Dean Knox, Daniel Ketter, Daniel Pickens-Jones, Stephanie Atwood, Christopher Lucas, Nori Jacoby, Alena Egner, Erin Hopkins, Rhea Howard, Joshua Hartshorne, Mariela Jennings, Jan Simson, Constance Bainbridge, Steven Pinker, Timothy O'Donnell, Max Krasnow, and Luke Glowacki. 2019. "Universality and Diversity in Human Song." Science (Research Article).
DownloadDean Knox, Teppei Yamamoto, Matthew Baum, and Adam Berinsky. 2019. "Design, Identification, and Sensitivity Analysis for Patient Preference Trials." Journal of the American Statistical Association (Applications and Case Studies).
DownloadDean Knox and Jonathan Mummolo. 2020. "A widely touted study found no evidence of racism in police shootings. It’s full of errors." Washington Post.
LinkDean Knox and Jonathan Mummolo. 2020. "It took us months to contest a flawed study on police bias. Here's why that's dangerous." Washington Post.
LinkJustin Grimmer, Dean Knox, and Brandon Stewart. Conditionally accepted. "Naïve regression requires weaker assumptions than factor models to adjust for multiple cause confounding." Conditionally accepted.
DownloadGuilherme Duarte, Noam Finkelstein, Dean Knox, Jonathan Mummolo, and Ilya Shpitser. "An Automated Solution to Causal Inference in Discrete Settings." Revise & resubmit.
DownloadCody Moser, Harry Lee-Rubin, Constance Bainbridge, Stephanie Atwood, Jan Simson, Dean Knox, Luke Glowacki, Andrzej Galbarczyk, Grazyna Jasienska, Cody Ross, Mary Neff, Alia Martin, Laura Cirelli, Sandra Trehub, Jinqi Song, Minju Kim, Adena Schachner, Tom Vardy, Quentin Atkinson, Jan Antfolk, Purnima Madhivanan, Anand Siddaiah, Caitlyn Placek, Gul Deniz Salali, Sarai Keestra, Manvir Singh, Scott Collins, John Patton, Camila Scaff, Jonathan Stieglitz, Cristina Moya, Rohan Sagar, Brian Wood, Max Krasnow, and Samuel Mehr. "Acoustic regularities in infant-directed vocalizations across cultures." Revise & resubmit.
DownloadDean Knox, Will Lowe, and Jonathan Mummolo. "Can Racial Bias in Policing Be Credibly Estimated Using Data Contaminated by Post-Treatment Selection?"
DownloadDean Knox. "ffgrep: Scalable Approximate String Matching."
DownloadFotini Christia, Dean Knox, and Jaffar Al-Rikabi. "Networks of Sectarianism: Experimental Evidence on Access to Services in Baghdad."
DownloadDean Knox. "A Model for Path Data."
DownloadDean Knox, Jake Hofman, and Duncan Watts. "The Structure and Dynamics of Diffusive Conversations."
Princeton POL 571. Probability Theory.
Princeton POL 574. Machine Learning.