About me:

I am a PhD researcher at the Political Science department of the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, where I am a third year PhD researcher. I just came back from a year long exchange at the London School of Economics. I recently took half a year leave of absence from my PhD and worked as a PhD trainee at the European Central Bank in the Fiscal Policies division of DG Economics.

My interests:

My thesis working title is: Essays in Agenda-setting, Central Bank Communication and Formal Institutional Set-ups. More generally, I am interested in applied social science questions which can be answered with various quantitative methods and big data.

• Political Economy (inequality, central banking)
• Computational social science (text-as-data, machine learning, social data science)
• Political behaviour (mass-elite linkage)
• Quantitative methods (causal inference, surveys, timeseries)

My background:

I hold a BSc in Liberal Arts and Sciences with a major in Economics and a minor in Big Data from the Erasmus University College in Rotterdam. I also hold a MSc in Political Economy of Europe from the London School of Economics. I have teaching experience in Microeconomics (BSc level) and Quantitative methods (PhD level) and have held several RA positions. I also have various teaching and board/committee experiences outside of academia.

Want to contact me?:

Email: laurencaroline.leek@eui.eu or reach out via twitter or Bluesky