Students | USC SPEC Lab

Graduate Students

Alix Ziff

Alix Ziff is a PhD candidate in the Political Science and International Relations department and the Lab Manager at SPEC. She also oversees the Power-sharing Project Team with Professor Graham. Alix has a M.A. in African Studies from Stanford University and a B.A. in Political Science & International relations from UCSD. Her research interests focus on how different groups are affected by conflict, instability and political contention differently. She is specifically interested in the roles of both governments and external actors in access to education in conflict-affected areas.

Miriam Barnum

Miriam is a doctoral student in Political Science and International Relations and Provost's Fellow in the Social Sciences at the University of Southern California. Her primary research focuses on nuclear politics, arms control, and treaty commitments, as well as the intersection between international security and political economy. She is also interested in quantitative political methodology, particularly text-as-data, machine learning, and network analysis.

Gaea Morales

Gaea Morales is a Ph.D. student in Political Science and International Relations at USC. She joined the SPEC Lab in Summer 2020 to support the development of training for the Research Experiences for Undergraduates Program and now serves as the Director of Data Science. Her own research is focused on environmental security and conflict prevention, and local-global governance and institutional linkages in the pursuit of sustainability. Outside of the lab, she is co-chair of the USC Keck Institute on Inequalities in Global Health Student Advisory Council. She holds a BA in Diplomacy and World Affairs and French Studies, and a minor in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies from Occidental College.

José Javier Alcocer

José Javier is a PhD candidate in the Political Science and International Relations department and research associate at SPEC. He has a M.P.P. from the Sol Price School of Public Policy at USC and a B.A. in Political Science from CSULB. His research focuses on how racial and gender identity affects institutional strategies of elected officials in office. In addition, he is interested in the use of causal inference tools along with machine learning models to understand behavior across political institutions.