The SCSDI is led by Professors Nico Ravanilla (UCSD) and Renard Sexton (Emory) – political scientists with deep experience studying conflict and development in Southeast Asia.
Leaders
Nico Ravanilla is an Associate Professor in the School of Global Policy & Strategy of the University of California San Diego. His research uses innovative quantitative techniques to evaluate policies that improve political selection, democratic accountability, and governance in developing democracies, with special focus on Southeast Asia and the Philippines. He has partnered with CSOs and universities in the Philippines on policy advocacies centered around weakening patronage and clientelism via electoral system redesign and social accountability initiatives.
Renard Sexton is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Emory University. He studies conflict and development, with a focus on external interventions intended to reduce violence in contexts including Myanmar, the Philippines, and Afghanistan. He also works on policy issues related to security and development, including through collaborations with the International Crisis Group, the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, the UN Foundation, the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, USIP, and the Heinrich Boell Foundation.
Contributors
The SCSDI has benefited from excellent current and past research assistance from a range of contributors. Thanks for your work!
Weifang is a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University and an international security scholar specializing in empirical research on interstate conflict and diplomacy. Driven by this research agenda, he applíe experimental and computational social science methods to examine the dynamics of conflict escalation and de-escalation, particularly within the context of U.S.-China great power competition.
Research Assistant
Tatsuya is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Political Science, Emory University. He earned my PhD in Politics at New York University. His research focuses on the comparative politics of civil war, counterinsurgency, and conflict resolution, with a particular emphasis on the Philippines.
Research Assistant
Uyen Pham is currently a Master’s student in Linguistic Data Science at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. She has contributed to the SCSDI Project since 2024, focusing on dataset collection of maritime incidents in the South China Sea, geocoding the events, and geospatial visualization. She is proficient in applying computational social science methods with R and Python. Her research interests center on migration patterns and conflict studies in the Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on analyzing public opinion data through discourse analysis and survey research.
Uyen Pham
Research Assistant
Hanh Linh is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Emory University. Her research examines public opinion and political participation, with a particular focus on conflict and religion in Southeast Asia.
Research Assistant
Ega Kurnia Yazid is a Fellow at the Decarbonization for Development (DfD) Lab, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Jakarta, Indonesia. He holds an MA in Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences from Columbia University and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Universitas Gadjah Mada. He is interested in combining artificial intelligence, geospatial analysis, non-traditional data, and econometrics to advance evidence-based policy discourse.
Research Assistant
Mai Ha Nguyen
Research Assistant
Ha (Joey) Do is an MS candidate in Politics Research at the University of Oxford. She graduated from the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy, where she studied Public Policy and Quantitative Methods. Her research explores post-colonial politics, political economy, and public goods distribution. Joey has worked with the U.S. Department of State and as a research assistant at MIT and the University of Arizona, focusing on education policy and data analysis. Passionate about cross-cultural dialogue, she was the Asia Regional Editor for the Michigan Journal of International Affairs. In her free time, she enjoys museums and Hanoi’s hidden coffee shops.
Joey Do
Research Assistant
