conjugateprior

Will Lowe

Welcome. I am a political methodologist specializing in statistical text analysis and causal inference, with applied work in legislative politics, political economy, social media and public policy. You can read about all that on the publications page, in the trusty CV, or just that one time in the New York Times.

I’m a Senior Research Scientist at the Hertie School in Berlin. In fact, I’m the Senior Research Scientist at Hertie School, since they admit they don’t have any others. This makes me very special - even specialer than being a Senior Research Specialist back at Princeton because there were quite a few of those. I just thought you ought to know that.

If you’re wondering what I did before that, this biographical sketch probably won’t help much, although it does implicate a lot of people who should have known better.

Day to day, I’ve got a desk in the Hertie School’s Data Science Lab, two courses in its newly launched Data Science Masters, and a starring role in the Hertie School’s Research Consulting service (internal link).

Outside of work you can find me on Bluesky and Mastodon, basically no longer on Muskelon or U+1D54F or whatever it’s now called. I’m also on stats.stackexchange.com and GitHub. It’s not clear whether those sites are work or not, which I suppose is the way everyone likes it.

There’s an actual old-school blog here too, though I no longer remember why. Apparently the post on fiddly formulae in lme4 and the one on random effects in Bayesian models are the draws. I think it’s probably time to revive it.

Pretty much everywhere on the web I’m conjugateprior and a storm over Styria, but if you’d need to pick me out of a lineup then you can study this picture, taken in my natural habitat (tweed).

In case you were curious

The site is made with Ark and hosted on Opalstack, a nice Webfaction successor. Search comes from DuckDuckGo with cookie-less and GDPR-compliant site analytics from Plausible.

There are no trackers because I don’t particularly want to know who you are and I wouldn’t exactly know what to do if I did. Except maybe wave and say ‘Hi!’ But I can do that already.

Hi!