Nic Weber: Academic Homepage

I am a computational social scientist with a background in computer and information science. My research broadly focuses on science, technology, and public policy. I study how public policy works, for whom, and under what circumstances. I also build tools that support the study of traditional social science questions using advanced computational methods.

I am currently an Associate Professor of Informatics at the University of Washington's Information School. At UW I direct the Puget Sound Clinic for Public Interest Technology (PCP). At UW, my group conducts mainly applied research. We contribute to fields like the science of science, computational social science, and computer supported cooperative work. Some topics we are working on now include the following:

Labor: Workplace organizing in the service sector; evaluating the efficacy of public policy interventions in the gig economy; and wage theft prediction.
Scientific Software: Modeling dependency networks vital to research communities; Economic valuations of public investment in software; and measuring sustainability in both open-source and research software.
Municipal Governance: Policy diffusion in sub-national legislatures; Measuring constitutional churn in Latin America; Modeling effective rhetorical frames, gender dynamics, and special interest group impact on legislation in city councils.

I also lead the development of open-source research infrastructure at a number of institutions: I am the technical director of the Qualitative Data Repository at Syracuse University, as well as the States and Institutions of Governance in Latin America (SIGLA) project at Georgetown University.

With my extremely talented PhD student Eva Brown, I also run the open-source project Council Data Project

Prospective Students

I have a number of funded research opportunities. If you are interested in working with me please see this page for more information.