Team
Here is a list of current students working under my supervision at the Université de Montréal.
PhD Students
Julien Robin
Julien Robin is a PhD student in political science at the Université de Montréal, under the supervision of Jean-François Godbout. A graduate in public law and public management (Université Paris-Dauphine PSL and ENA), his research focuses on parliamentary politics and the evolution of the French party system. His thesis looks at the impact of regulatory changes on the development of parliamentary groups in the French National Assembly since 1910. A keen populariser of science, Julien regularly publishes articles in The Conversation (e.g., here, and here) and is involved in developing the datan.fr project, a tool designed to report on the parliamentary activity of French MPs.
Matthew Taylor
Matthew Taylor is a PhD candidate in political science at the Université de Montréal. His research interests are principally on the subject of Canadian party politics, with a particular focus on the linkages between party systems at the federal and provincial levels. He did his undergraduate and master’s degrees in political science at the University of Toronto. He has published the article “Voting for women in recent Canadian elections” in French Politics, and he has written a recension titled “The Motivation to Vote: Explaining Electoral Participation” reviewed in Politiques et Sociétés.
Virginie Vandewalle
Virginie Vandewalle is a PhD student in political science at the Université de Montréal. Her research focuses on Canadian politics, with a particular emphasis on the gender gap in politics at both the federal and provincial levels. Under the supervision of Ruth Dassonneville, her master’s thesis at the Université de Montréal examined the question: “Are right-wing political parties favored by female suffrage in Canada and Quebec?” Vandewalle has contributed to the field with her article “Voting for women in recent Canadian elections”, published in French Politics.
MA Students
Camille Thibault
Camille Thibault is a master’s student in political science at the Université de Montréal and is simultaneously pursuing a microprogram in big data analysis. Her research interests revolve around Canadian and Quebec politics, artificial intelligence, and misinformation. As part of her involvement with the Complex Data Lab, she has published “Towards Reliable Misinformation Mitigation: Generalization, Uncertainty”, and “GPT-4 and Uncertainty Resolution in Misinformation Detection”. Her master’s thesis, scheduled for completion in December 2025, will focus on detecting misinformation within the Quebec electoral context.
Svetlana Zhuk
Svetlana Zhuk is starting her Master’s in Political Science in Fall 2024. Her main interest is exploring the influence of artificial intelligence on political institutions.
Other Student Collaborators
I am also collaborating with these PhD students from Computer Science and Political Science on several different projects.
Andreea Musulan
Andreea Musulan is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto working in the field of computational social science. In her thesis, she researches the dynamics of online communication from a political perspective, and is highly interested in understanding how and why actors use digital tools to interact with the world around them. While her academic experience is full of NLP and ML applications to answer real world problems, she has also gained industry experience working with a cryptocurrency investment company. She is passionate about learning new skills and developing tools meant to positively influence society.
Bijean Ghafouri
Bijean Ghafouri is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California. He studies public opinion, political psychology, information processing and computational social science.
Gabrielle Péloquin-Skulski
Gabrielle Péloquin-Skulski is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she is a member of the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab (PERL), under the guidance of Professor Adam J. Berinsky. Her research interests lie in the fields of American politics and quantitative methodology, with a focus on political misinformation. Gabrielle’s work more specifically delves into the psychological underpinnings that influence individuals’ propensity to accept and disseminate political misinformation online. Her doctoral research examines how the content of political (mis)information interacts with emotional responses, shaping people’s attitudes and behaviors. Gabrielle is also affiliated with the Complex Data Lab, directed by Professor Reihaneh Rabbany. Prior to her graduate studies at MIT, she graduated with a B.Sc. Honors and a M.Sc. in political science from the Université de Montréal.
Kellin Pelrine
Kellin Pelrine is a PhD candidate at McGill University and the Mila AI Institute, supervised by Reihaneh Rabbany. He’s also a member of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship, research advisor at FAR AI, and cofounder and CSO at startup Stitch. Pelrine leads research hoping to create practical, transformatively impactful machine learning systems. Recently, his focus is AI safety, misinformation mitigation, and AI agents. He’s also worked on education, political polarization, human trafficking, and temporal graphs. At FAR AI, he and collaborators have several projects on robustness of frontier models and of superhuman AIs that play the board game Go; for beating the latter as a human he has been called the “man who beat the machine”. At Stitch, he’s building the AI extension of imagination with a visual interface for LLMs.
Zachary Yang
Zachary Yang is a PhD candidate at McGill University and Mila. He is passionate about the practical application of AI and ML. Under the expert guidance of Dr. Reihaneh Rabbany, he explores innovative ways to harness AI/ML for real-world impact. His research centers around making AI/ML accessible to people, bridging the gap between cutting-edge research and practical solutions. He’s worked on detecting toxicity for in-game chat in real time. As a member of the CSDC (Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship), he engages in interdisciplinary intersection between AI and social science. His mission is to apply AI to developing user-friendly tools, applications, and systems. Let’s explore the exciting intersection of AI, ML, and societal impact!