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 cutting-edge methods—machine learning, natural language processing, and social network analysis—to understand how online communities translate into offline political action. I am equally 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:
- 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 federal research 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
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
7 courses taught | 45+ students mentored | $1.38M in grant funding (PI) | 276K article views | Featured in 8 major media outlets
Media Recognition
Research and expertise featured in: Washington Post • New York Times • NPR • BBC • Politico • Wired • Bloomberg • Meet the Press
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