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Gary King

Dr. Gary King, PhD, is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard University -- one of 22 with the title of University Professor, Harvard's most distinguished faculty position. He is based in the Department of Government in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and serves as Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Dr. King develops and applies empirical methods in many areas of social science research, focusing on innovations that span the range from statistical theory to practical application.

Dr. King has been elected as Fellow of six honorary societies -- National Academy of Sciences; American Statistical Association; American Association for the Advancement of Science; American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Society for Political Methodology; and American Academy of Political and Social Science. He has served as President of the Society for Political Methodology (1997-1999) and Vice President of the American Political Science Association (2003-2004). He was appointed a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation (1994-1995), Visiting Fellow at Oxford (1994), and Senior Science Advisor to the World Health Organization (1998-2003).  His more than 125 journal articles, 15 open source software packages, and eight books span most aspects of political methodology, many fields of political science, and several other scholarly disciplines.

Dr. King's work is widely read across scholarly fields and beyond academia. He was listed as the most cited political scientist of his cohort; among the group of "political scientists who have made the most important theoretical contributions" to the discipline "from its beginnings in the late 19th century to the present"; and on ISI's list of the most highly cited researchers across the social sciences. His work on legislative redistricting has been used in most American states by legislators, judges, lawyers, political parties, minority groups, and private citizens, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court. His work on inferring individual behavior from aggregate data has been used in many states and in many other practical contexts. His contributions to methods for achieving cross-cultural comparability in survey research have been used in surveys in more than 80 countries. Dr. King led an evaluation of the Mexican universal health insurance program, which includes the largest randomized health policy experiment to date. He is co-founder of Crimson Hexagon, a firm built on his methods of automated text analysis. The statistical methods and software he developed are used extensively in academia, government, consulting, and private industry.

Dr. King has served on 26 editorial boards; on the governing councils of the American Political Science Association, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, the Society for Political Methodology, and the Midwest Political Science Association; and on several National Research Council and National Science Foundation panels.