Yunus Emre Tapan

Computational Social Scientist · PhD Candidate, Northeastern University

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science (minor: Computational Social Science) at Northeastern University. My research examines the segregation of political life — how citizens allocate attention across partisan lines, how publics turn against other nations, and how elites and experts divide — in domains spanning American politics and international relations. I work with natural language processing, network analysis, and statistics, and study whether the instruments themselves, including large language models, measure what we think they do. At Northeastern I have served as a Teaching Assistant for courses including Comparative Politics, Globalization & International Affairs, Research Methods, and Statistical Analysis. I worked as a Data Consultant for the Boston Area Research Initiative (Northeastern & Harvard universities) and led the AI bootcamp of the AIDE (AI + Data Ethics) Summer Program at Northeastern’s Ethics Institute. I have also been a Research Fellow at the NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science and in the Aldrich Resilience Lab. My work has been presented at APSA, MPSA, ISA, PolMeth, PolNet, IC2S2, NetSci, and PaCSS.

research · teaching · data · service · public scholarship · now


Research

The segregation of political life
Conceptualization, Measurement & Validity

Research & publications


Currently

  • Jul 2026Back from PolMeth, where I presented a poster on "Stance Is Not a Construct" · write-up
  • Jul 2026Guest lecture at SICSS-Istanbul: "Anthropology of Machines: From Black Box to White Box" · write-up · slides
  • 2026Working papers on the road at ISA, MPSA, PolMeth, APSA, IC2S2, NetSci, and PaCSS — follow along

Vitae

  • PhD Candidate, Political Science (minor: Computational Social Science) — Northeastern University, expected Spring 2027. Committee: Nick Beauchamp (chair), David Lazer, Risa Kitagawa.
  • Graduate Certificate, Computational Social Science — Northeastern University, 2022
  • MSc, Middle East Studies — Middle East Technical University, 2019
  • BA, Economics — Boğaziçi University, 2016

The full record is in my CV (PDF).