Stephen Pettigrew

I am the Director of Data Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania’s Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies and the Deputy Executive Director of UPenn’s Fox Leadership Program. I am also a Senior Analyst for the NBC News Decision Desk and Data Analytics Lab.

My roles at Penn are a mixture of research, teaching, mentorship, and administrative responsibilities. The PORES program oversees the Survey Research and Data Analytics undergraduate minor degree program. I teach a course in Applied Data Science, which is taken by most undergraduates seeking the minor. I also oversee research being conducted by students through the Fox Leadership Research Fellowship program. I work with multiple students each semester on a variety research projects that help to develop their technical skills and substantive knowledge about politics. The fellowship also provides me an opportunity to mentor students and to help them achieve their academic and professional goals.

I also work at NBC News as part of the Decision Desk team, which is responsible for projecting the winner in elections for federal and statewide offices. One of my major responsibilities throughout the year is the development of new statistical models to use on Election Day. Through that work, I have redesigned the user interface of multiple aspects of proprietary Election Night software and worked with our team’s software engineers to implement the changes. In the 2020 and 2022 election cycles, I ran NBC’s House Desk. Leading a team of other analysts, we projected the winner in all 435 Congressional races and projected majority control of the chamber. I also coordinated the Decision Desk’s delegate allocation process during the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.

In 2017, I received my PhD in political science from Harvard University. My political science research applies statistics and machine learning methods to timely questions about voting accessibility and the way we administer elections in the United States. My work informs broader discussions about access to the ballot, race, representation, and effective governance. I have published my research in several peer-reviewed journals including Science, Electoral Studies, and Political Science Quarterly.

In addition to my work in political science, I have applied my data science skills to research about analytics in football, basketball, hockey and the Olympics. This research has been published in peer-reviewed journals, and I am a freelance contributor to the Wall Street Journal, FiveThirtyEight, and Deadspin.

I received a Masters degree in statistics from Harvard in 2013. I am a proud graduate of University of Georgia, receiving a Masters degree in political science and Bachelors degrees in political science and history. I worked as a project manager and data scientist with the MIT Election Data and Science Lab.