Stanford Computational Policy Lab

In the fall of 2020, we organized a Get Out the Vote event to encourage Stanford students to participate in our civic duty.

In the summer of 2020, we hosted five interns for five weeks in collaboration with SMASH Rising, a program that prepares college students of color for STEM careers. In addition to learning the basics of data science and the R programming language, the SMASH interns worked with a partner newsroom to design a tool for reducing gender and racial disparities in journalism.

In the summer of 2019, we invited 16 local high school students from groups traditionally underrepresented in STEM to join us for an intensive, two-day data science workshop at Stanford. Most of the students started the workshop with little to no programming experience; by the end of the workshop, all of them could confidently explore and visualize data from the Open Policing Project using the R programming language.

In 2019, we held a two-day data science workshop with over 50 students, faculty, and staff from the Stanford computational social science community. With the support of PhD students and staff members from SCPL, participants learned how to apply foundational data science skills to their own research by manipulating and visualizing data from the Open Policing Project.

We hosted a speaker series to bring local community organizations on campus to voice their concerns and biggest hurdles to effective practice.