Penn State boasts one of the strongest political methodology faculties in the country, developing new and innovative approaches to data collection, data analysis and statistical inference.

Faculty specialties include machine learning, network analysis, text analysis, time series analysis, formal modeling, and survey research. Our Social Data Analytics program emphasizes the need for emerging methods in data science to be informed by theoretical and substantive expertise on politics, society, and human behavior.

Many of our graduate students pursue a dual-title Ph.D. in Social Data Analytics (SoDA), and the Center for Social Data Analytics (C-SoDA) provides many research for student and faculty research in this area.