About Me

Bio

Dino Pinterpe Christenson is a professor (Ph.D., Ohio State University; B.A., University of Michigan) in the Department of Political Science at Washington University, a faculty affiliate in the Division of Computational & Data Science, and a research fellow at the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy. He currently serves on the Faculty Advisory Board for the Center for Teaching and Learning and as the director of the Environmental Policy Major.

Christenson studies American political behavior and quantitative methods, with recent work exploring presidential voting behavior, campaign dynamics in presidential primaries and caucuses, the coalition behavior of interest groups, and public opinion and the media environment of institutional outcomes. More generally, his research in American politics concerns electoral behavior, public opinion, political psychology, political communication, interest groups and judicial politics. He has broad methodological interests as well, including survey research, experimental design, longitudinal and nested data models, Bayesian analysis, social network analysis and causal inference.

His articles have appeared in American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Political Behavior, and Social Networks, among other outlets, and received the Editors’ Choice Article Award from Political Analysis, the Best Article Award by the Law & Courts Section of APSA, as well as the Best Article Award from Political Research Quarterly. He is coauthor of two books: The Myth of the Imperial Presidency: How Public Opinion Checks the Unilateral Executive (University of Chicago Press, 2020); and Applied Social Science Methodology: An Introductory Guide (Cambridge University Press, 2017) — and coeditor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Engaged Methodological Pluralism. His work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Weidenbaum Center, Hariri Institute and Dirksen Congressional Center.

Before coming to WUSTL, he was on the Political Science faculty at Boston University, where he served as their first director of the Advanced Programs (i.e., the Honors and BA/MA programs), and cofounded the Department's first research workshop. He was also an institute fellow and a faculty affiliate at the Hariri Institute for Computational Science & Engineering and sat on the steering committee for the Data Science Initiative (now Computing & Data Sciences). From 2012 to 2015 he was a member of the first class of junior faculty fellows at Hariri, and in 2018 a visiting scholar at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. In 2016, he cochaired the inaugural Day of BU Data Science (aka 'BUDS Day'). Prior to academia, he worked in politics as a public affairs consultant and as a campaign advisor for Barack Obama's US Senate race and Jennifer Granholm's first gubernatorial campaign.

Hobbies

Lineage: Family trees, old photos and stories
World: Documents my travels
Photos & Filmini: Pics and videos of family and friends
Graphic Design: Websites and designs