About me

Hello! My name is Simon (pronounced sea + (monkey - key)) Hoellerbauer. Starting Fall 2024, I am Lecturer of Data Analytics and Computational Social Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I earned my Ph.D. in Political Science, with a minor in Statistics, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previously, I was Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Science and Society at Vassar College from 2022 to 2024.

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 age-old questions of comparative politics.

I am also passionate about teaching. I have taught both comparative politics and methods classes. I am constantly looking for ways to improve my syllabi and to make classes more interesting for my students.