I am a professor in the department of political science at the University of Houston (UH), principal investigator for the NSF-funded Community Responsive Algorithms for Social Accountability (CRASA) project, director of the Machine-Assisted Human Decision-making (MAHD) Lab (UH), founding associate director of analytics for the Initiative for Sustainable Energy Policy, editor of Research & Politics, and a research associate at the Hobby Center for Public Policy.
My research spans a number of areas in comparative politics, international relations and American politics, including: computational social science, technology and public policy, democratization, deliberation, energy and the environment, and prediction models.
My publications have appeared in outlets like Science, The American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, and International Studies Quarterly among others. My book, Introduction to R for Social Scientists: A Tidy Programming Approach, based on my ICPSR workshop, introduces students to statistical modeling and programming in R using the Tidyverse set of tools. My work has generated over 5,000 citations (i10-index of 35 over the past 5 years).
I have received several awards for my research, including the Heinz I. Eulau Award for best paper published in the American Political Science Review and the University of Houston Award for Excellence in Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity. I was also awarded the Ross M. Lence Teaching Excellence Award for the social sciences at the University of Houston.
I have also received support for my research from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the Templeton Foundation, the Kettering Foundation and the Democracy Fund, among others.
If you would like to contact me, my email is rkennedy(at)uh.edu. You can also visit my Google Scholar page to view more of my research.