Welcome! I am a Ph.D. student in Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis, majoring in comparative politics and political methodology. Substantively, I study media bias and media capture in democracies, as well as propaganda, censorship, and repression in autocracies. Methodologically, I am interested in text-as-data analysis. I also use econometrics, field and survey experiments, and computational methods in my research. My work has been published in International Studies Quarterly.

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At WashU, I am affiliated with the Political Data Science Lab. I also worked as a Research Assistant at New York University Abu Dhabi in 2021 and served as an Editorial Assistant at the American Political Science Review from 2023 to 2024.

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You can follow me on Twitter @ruilinlai or email me at ruilin.lai@wustl.edu.