Shigeo Hirano (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2003), is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, Faculty Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, and Faculty Fellow at the Columbia Applied Statistics Center. Currently, he is at Yale University as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science and an Associate Research Scholar at the Center for the Study of American Politics. His research focuses on elections and representation. This year he will be working on several projects related to U.S. primary elections. He also intends to spend part of the year working on projects related to Japanese politics and public finance. His research has recently appeared or is forthcoming in World Politics, the Journal of Politics, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies and Legislative Studies Quarterly.

Sung-youn Kim (Ph.D., Stony Brook University, 2005) is an Associate Research Scientist at the Yale Center for the Study of American Politics and Lecturer with the Department of Political Science. His research broadly centers on political behavior and research methodology. He has been working on a research project to develop a psychological model of political information processing, apply it via agent-based simulations to empirical voting behavior and choice behavior in games, and examine its implications on individual and collective dynamics. In particular, his research focuses on how cognition and affect interact with each other to influence information processing, thereby, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior. The model has been applied to empirical dynamics of candidate evaluation during an election and empirical dynamics of cooperation in repeated Prisoner's Dilemma. Currently, he is working on a study that compares the psychological model with a general Bayesian learning model, focusing on their implications on the responsiveness and persistence of candidate evaluation. He is also working on a study that examines survey respondents' perceptions about candidate issue positions.

William Leblanc (Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007) is a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University's Center for the Study of American Politics and Lecturer with the Department of Political Science. His research deals with measuring the ideology of voters, politicians, and parties and relating the distribution of voter ideology to party seat shares, vote shares, the incumbency advantage, and the economy. His teaching interests include the U.S. Congress, elections, political economy, game theory, and quantitative methodology. His past research has appeared in the Journal of Public Economics.