About me

Hello! My name is Simon (pronounced sea + (monkey - key)) Hoellerbauer. Currently, I am Lecturer of Data Analytics and Computational Social Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Starting Fall 2025, I will be Director of Social Science Research at Trinity College. I earned my Ph.D. in Political Science, with a minor in Statistics, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

I have both substantive and methodological research interests. My substantive research focuses on studying donor support of civil society in developing countries and the role of civil society in development and democracy assistance using survey experiments, observational analysis, and novel statistical models. My methodological interests support my substantive focus, lying in the measurement of regime types and civil society, improvements of survey methodologies and analysis, and using machine learning techniques to reinvestigate questions in the social sciences.

I am also passionate about teaching. I particular enjoy teaching about research methods. I am constantly looking for ways to improve my syllabi and to make classes more interesting for my students.