Cory McCartan

Cory McCartan is the Hoben and Patricia Thomas and Thomas and Ann Hettmansperger Early Career Professor of Statistics at Penn State University, with an affiliate appointment in Political Science. His research focuses on methodological and applied problems in computational social science, including redistricting, Bayesian methods, causal inference, and racial disparities. He co-leads the Algorithm-Assisted Redistricting Methodology (ALARM) Project at Harvard University and develops open-source software for redistricting analysis (e.g., redist, birdie). McCartan holds a Ph.D. in Statistics from Harvard (2023) and a B.A. in Mathematics from Grinnell College (2019).

His work bridges statistical methodology and policy applications, with recent emphasis on legislative redistricting reforms, gerrymandering analysis, and privacy-preserving census data methods. Key projects include evaluating redistricting algorithms, quantifying partisan bias, and estimating disparities in administrative data using Bayesian models.

Publications span topics like redistricting simulation, census privacy impacts, and neighborhood modeling. His ALARM Project produces 50-state redistricting simulations for public use, emphasizing reproducible workflows and open-source tools. McCartan's software packages (e.g., redist, conformalbayes) are widely adopted in policy and academic research.

Grants and collaborations involve the Voting and Election Science Team and Harvard Data Science Initiative, with computational support from Microsoft. His work has been covered in Science Advances, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science.