Meet the Fellow: Jonathan Colner
This entry is part of our Meet the Fellow blog series, which introduces and highlights Faculty Fellows who have recently joined CDS.
Meet CDS Faculty Fellow Jonathan Colner, who will be joining us this fall. Colner received his PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Davis in 2024, and has a keen interest in leveraging data science to understand local political institutions.
Colner’s research focuses on developing innovative tools for measuring the policy-making activities and outcomes of city councils. He is particularly interested in using object detection and large language models to extract and clean data from messy local government administrative sources, such as city council meeting minutes and municipal codes.
“I’m excited to join NYU CDS and work at the intersection of data science and local politics,” said Colner. “I look forward to interacting with experts who have in-depth experience in developing and applying these new tools to better understand how local governments function and differ from each other.”
Colner’s work aims to address a significant gap in our understanding of local governments, particularly in the policy-making realm. By using advanced machine learning techniques, he hopes to systematically analyze long-form text data that has been previously underutilized due to its unwieldy nature.
Currently, Colner’s research focuses on municipalities in California, with plans to expand his work nationwide in the future. His projects involve extracting and categorizing information from city council meeting minutes and municipal codes, which can run hundreds of pages long and contain a wealth of information on local governance.
Prior to his doctoral studies, Colner graduated from the University of Chicago in 2017 with a B.A. in Political Science. He also gained valuable experience working as a research assistant at Westat, where he carried out program evaluations for federal programs.
In addition to his primary research, Colner has explored the effects of electoral institutions such as Ranked Choice Voting on representation and candidate entry. His diverse interests and background in both political science and data analysis make him a valuable addition to the interdisciplinary community at NYU’s Center for Data Science.
To view all our current faculty fellows, please visit the CDS Faculty Fellow page on our website.
By Stephen Thomas
