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 both democratic and autocratic contexts, as well as judicial repression in autocracies. Methodologically, I am interested in text-as-data analysis and social network analysis. My research is published in International Studies Quarterly.

​

At WashU, I am affiliated with the Political Data Science Lab. I am also an Editorial Assistant for the American Political Science Review, and an Assistant for the Authoritarian Political Systems Group (APSG). In 2021, I was a Research Assistant at New York University Abu Dhabi. 

​

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