Hi! I’m Pia Deshpande — a PhD Student in the Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley. I have a particular interest in how social media shapes American politics.
Prior to starting at Berkeley, I was a pre-doctoral researcher at the Cooperative Election Study (CES) and a research assistant at the MIT Election Lab. I also worked as a data journalist for the Associated Press during the 2020 election, and interned at CNN International in Hong Kong and POLITICO in D.C. In 2020, I earned a B.A. in Political Science from Columbia University.
Though I am not a journalist anymore, I continue to write for non-academic venues as a researcher. So far, I have published in The Monkey Cage and Lawfare.
During my time with the CES, I wrote tutorials for my students on how to use R. I wrote these tutorials before I even began graduate school, so I take only tenuous responsibility for the prose they contain. You can find them under tutorials .
You can contact me at pia_deshpande[at]berkeley[dot]edu.