Chris Brown joins Azavea as a Software Developer on the Justice and Election Services team. He has extensive experience working with complex data as part of his research in the political science PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania. His research spans from international to American politics where he has investigated the diffusion and proliferation of conventional weapons systems to how political parties shape the political agenda in the US Congress. Chris has extensive experience using advanced statistical techniques to model complex phenomena, machine learning, and natural language processing as part of his research.

Prior to joining the JEST team at Azavea, Chris was enrolled in the political science PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania. While a student at Penn, Chris worked on a diverse set of research projects. His dissertation uses natural language processing to examine the Congressional Record and measure political polarization based on the speeches that members of Congress give. Additionally, Chris has developed a knack for finding, analyzing, and visualizing data that has previously been hard to reach by political scientists.

In his free time you can find Chris tinkering with Python or civic data at Philadelphia area meetups and hackathons. Lately he has been busy adding features to StateRep.Me – a website he helped create that enables Pennsylvanians to easily monitor the activity of their state legislators. When not in front of the computer screen you can usually find Chris in the kitchen trying to perfect his cheesecake recipe.