Kirk Bansak is the inaugural Faculty Director of the Yardi Scholarship and oversees the Yardi academic program, including the design of the Berkeley Changemaker cohort course and capstone course. He is an Assistant Professor in the Travers Department of Political Science, and also a faculty affiliate of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI) and the Immigration Policy Lab (IPL) at Stanford University and ETH Zurich. Professor Bansak’s research interests are in causal inference, experimental design and analysis, refugee resettlement and asylum politics, algorithmic decision-making, and public opinion.
Professor Bansak is excited to join the Yardi Scholarship team and support its commitments to social change, democracy, and harnessing technology for the benefit of society. These are themes that resonate deeply with Professor Bansak’s own scholarly goals. Much of his research has focused on studying how algorithmic decision-making can be applied to improve the geographic placement of refugees and asylum seekers. In this work, he has developed novel methods focused on promoting refugees’ and asylum seekers’ potential to thrive in their new countries. In related research, he also works to better understand the sources of public support for (and hostility towards) forced migrants.
Mirroring the interdisciplinarity of the Yardi Scholarship, Professor Bansak also has an interdisciplinary research agenda and signature. This is reflected in the diversity of his work, to include publications in general science journals as well as outlets in political science, statistics, and operations research. His peer-reviewed work has been published or is forthcoming in Science, Nature, PNAS Nexus, Nature Human Behaviour, American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, Statistical Science, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A, Political Science Research and Methods, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC). His research has also been featured in various media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, BBC, Forbes, Bloomberg, and The Atlantic. Profesor Bansak earned his Ph.D. in Political Science and M.S. in Statistics from Stanford University, M.A. in Law and Diplomacy from Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and B.A. in Anthropology from Harvard University.