Alan Gerber

Alan Gerber is Sterling Professor of Political Science, director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and professor of economics and of and statistics and data science at Yale University. He also has affiliations in the Yale School of Public Health and the Jackson School of Global Affairs. Previously he was appointed the Faculty of Arts and Sciences divisional director for the social sciences and became the inaugural FAS dean of social science, serving in this role from 2014 to 2021.

His current research focuses on the political economy of evidence production and use in public policy and organizations. He has published extensively on the application of experimental methods to the study of campaign communications, and he has designed and performed experimental evaluations of many political communications programs, both partisan and non-partisan in nature. His book on field experiments, co-authored with Donald Green, is a widely used resource for researchers seeking to apply field experimental methods to problems in the social sciences.

Gerber’s academic honors and awards include the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Organized Section on Experimental Research, the Louis Brownlow Book Award, the Donald K. Price Book Award, and the Heinz Eulau Award for the best article in the American Political Science Review. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, and the Society for Political Methodology, and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences.

Gerber has served as president of the APSA Organized Section on Experimental Research as well the chair of the APSA Organized Section on Experimental Research Reporting Standards Committee. He is the faculty director of the ISPS program Democratic Innovations, which promotes debate and research on ways to improve representation and government performance.

He received his B.A. from Yale University in 1986 and his Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994.