About
I am a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, specializing in computational analysis of political violence and extremism. My research develops and applies transformer-based NLP, network analysis, and time-series causal inference to understand how online communities translate into offline political action. I am also committed to teaching and mentoring undergraduates, drawing on my own liberal arts education at Middlebury College to make computational methods accessible and engaging for students across disciplines.
Key Experience:
- Research Fellow, National Humanities Alliance Humanities Workforce Program
- Humane Studies Fellow, Institute for Humane Studies (2025-Present)
- Investigative Consultant to the House Select Committee on January 6th
- Deputy Director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism & Counterterrorism
- Principal Investigator on $1.38M in externally funded grants
- Instructor of Record at Middlebury College and MIIS
Research Expertise
Methods:
- Machine Learning & NLP
- Social Network Analysis
- Causal Inference
- Data Science & Visualization
Substantive Areas:
- Political Violence & Extremism
- Digital Platform Research
- Technology & Society
- Computational Social Science
Featured Publications
Newhouse, A. and Kowert, R. “Extremist Identity Creation Through Performative Infighting on Steam.” Frontiers in Psychology, August 2025.
Kowert, R., Kilmer, E., and Newhouse, A. “Taking it to the Extreme: Prevalence and Nature of Extremist Sentiment in Games.” Frontiers in Psychology, 2024.
Newhouse, A. “The Threat is the Network: The Multi-Node Structure of Neo-Fascist Accelerationism.” CTC Sentinel, 2021.
McGuffie, K. and Newhouse, A. “The Radicalization Risks of GPT-3 and Advanced Neural Language Models.” arXiv, 2020.
Impact
3 courses as instructor of record; 4 as teaching assistant | 52 students mentored | $1.38M in externally funded grants (PI) | 276K article views
Media Recognition
Research and expertise featured in major outlets including: Washington Post • New York Times • NPR • BBC • Politico • Wired • Bloomberg • Meet the Press • Vice • Axios • FiveThirtyEight • ProPublica • Denver7
Current Projects
Dissertation Research: Investigating social processes and collective mobilization in the online extreme right using NLP, network analysis, and causal inference
COVID-19 Visual Politics: Analyzing partisan differences in pandemic media coverage using computer vision and text analysis
Gaming & Extremism: Multi-platform investigation of recruitment and radicalization in digital gaming environments
Contact: alex.newhouse@colorado.edu