Tyler Simko

I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University in the Department of Politics. In Fall 2025, I will start as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan.

I am a Co-PI of the Algorithm-Assisted Redistricting Methodology (ALARM) Project, a research group focused on political geography and spatial inequality. I received my PhD from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 2024, where I was affiliated with the Center for American Political Studies, Program on Education Policy and Governance, and the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative.

I specialize in US state and local politics, with particular expertise in how policy design can improve or worsen inequality between our cities, neighborhoods, and schools. I have active research agendas in policy areas like legislative redistricting ("gerrymandering"), school segregation, and data privacy. Methodologically, I develop and use techniques in computational social science, causal inference, and machine learning to evaluate inequality and how it can be reduced. My work has been covered by media outlets like The Washington Post and The Associated Press.

I also study policymaking in local governments like city councils, school boards, and planning boards. For example, I co-created LocalView — the largest audio, video, and text database of local government meetings in the United States — with Soubhik Barari.

I teach data science and American politics courses at the graduate, undergraduate, and high school levels. For example, I created a course on US Local Policymaking in Spring 2022 for Harvard undergraduates, re-designed the summer data science training for MPA/ID students at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2022, and created an Introduction to Data Science in Summer 2021 for high school students in New Jersey.

I regularly partner with federal, state, and local officials to improve program design and reduce administrative burdens. I am a Data Scientist at the Office of Evaluation Sciences, where I work in an interdisciplinary team to design causal evaluations of government programs. Before graduate school, I was elected to two terms on the South Amboy Board of Education in New Jersey and served as the President.