Sebastián Vallejo Vera

Sebastián Vallejo Vera is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Western Ontario. He holds a PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park. His research focuses on gendered political institutions, racial identity, and racism in Latin America, with a methodological emphasis on Natural Language Processing (NLP) applied to legislative and social media texts. He is affiliated with the interdisciplinary Laboratory of Computational Social Science (iLCSS) and the Hewlett Packard Enterprise Data Science Institute (University of Houston). Previously, he served as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Houston and as an Assistant Professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey, México.

His research explores barriers faced by marginalized groups in political institutions and the strategic behavior of political actors. Methodologically, he employs advanced NLP techniques, including transformer models, to analyze legislative speeches, tweets, and other text data. His work bridges computational methods with substantive political questions, particularly in gender and race studies.

Vallejo Vera’s recent articles analyze topics such as racist discourse activation on social media, legislative speech patterns, and the impact of electoral systems on representation. His work has been published in journals like The Journal of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, and PloS one. He also contributes to open-source computational tools for text analysis and regularly collaborates on interdisciplinary projects.