Bruce Desmarais, Assistant Professor of Political Science, has been named a Research Fellow at the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI) for the academic year 2013-2014.

Professor Desmarais will be in residence at SAMSI during this time to participate in their Computational Methods in Social Sciences program. 

As a SAMSI Fellow, Professor Desmarais will explore social networks, agent-based models, and modern statistical methodology for censuses and surveys through workshops, working groups, and informal collaborations with other researchers. These experiences will build on his existing line of research, which focuses on the development and application of methods for the analysis of political networks. Most recently, he has used network analysis to explore international conflict, defense alliances, terrorist events, and legislative collaboration. 

SAMSI is a partnership of universities -- Duke; North Carolina State; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill -- the National Institute of Statistical Sciences; and the William Kenan, Jr. Institute for Engineering, Technology and Science. It is part of the Mathematical Sciences Institutes program of the Division of Mathematical Sciences at the National Science Foundation.