William Hobbs

William Hobbs is the Lois and Mel Tukman Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University, affiliated with the College of Human Ecology. His research intersects politics and health, focusing on social spillover effects of government actions and adaptation to life changes through computational social science methods.

• Teaches Data Science for Social Scientists I & II (HD/Psych 2930/2940)
• Co-teaches graduate course Text and Networks in Social Science Research (HD/Soc/Info 6610, Govt 6619)

Research strengths include causal inference, representative sampling, and machine learning applications for small training sets. His work has been featured in The Atlantic, Science Magazine, and other major outlets.

Current Data Science Lab projects analyze:

• Political polarization in social media
• Health behavior networks
• Government policy feedback
• Content moderation systems

Lab hires Cornell undergraduates with R/Python experience for data management tasks through HD 4010 research credit.