Tyler Simko

I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan. I specialize in US state and local politics, political geography, and computational social science.

I am a Co-PI of the Algorithm-Assisted Redistricting Methodology (ALARM) Project, a research group focused on how public policy influences spatial inequality. Before moving to Michigan, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University in the Department of Politics. 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 have active research agendas in policy areas like legislative redistricting ("gerrymandering"), subnational policymaking by governments like city councils and school boards, 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 New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC News, and The Associated Press.

As part of my work, I often create and publicly release large datasets using open-source tools. 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.