About

Welcome! I am T. Eric Ngo, a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Iowa. You can also call me Anh-Tu (my Vietnamese name).

My primary research interests lie at the nexus of international relations, foreign policy, comparative politics, and computational social science (CSS). In my ongoing dissertation project, I explore how networks of political elites influence constraints on the top leader, thereby shaping policy and political outcomes such as international conflict, repression, and elite in-fighting. To do this, I construct an original database of elite networks across countries and years, employing fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) to extract information about elites’ biographies and relationships.

More broadly, I am interested in the interplay between domestic and international elements and their implications to state behavior. In my other work, I examine how domestic factors such as ethnic inequality and political institutions influence states’ external conflict behavior. I am also examining how political turnovers and domestic institutions shape the foreign aid competition between superpowers, namely the US and China.

Methodologically, I employ a wide range of approachs to studying social phenomenon, combining computational tools with quantitative techniques and qualitative archival studies. I can implement econometric and statistical methods (e. g., generalized linear models, time-series analysis, and multilevel modeling) in Stata, R, and Python. I am also an enthusiast of applications of computational methods, specifically LLMs, machine learning, and social networks analysis to solving data challenges in social sciences.

My background

I received my M.A. from the Department of Political Science at the University of Iowa in 2023. Before Iowa, I earned my B.Sc. in Political Science and International Relations at Truman State University, Missouri, in 2021.

I am a proud native of Vietnam. Coming from a central province of Vietnam and now studying in the US Midwest, it seems I’m fated to reside almost exclusively in the middle regions of the countries I’ve lived in (interestingly, my surname in Vietnamese means “corn”, a major agricultural product of Iowa and Missouri).

If you have any inquiries, please reach out to me via (tu-ngo[at]uiowa.edu).