Kirk Bansak
Associate Professor of Political Science
University of California, Berkeley

Professor Bansak is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and the inaugural Faculty Director of the Yardi Scholarship at UC Berkeley.

 

At the center of his research is decision-making under complexity — understanding, and improving, how people and systems navigate consequential and multidimensional choices. This includes:

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• Studying how individuals make choices and formulate preferences in the face of tradeoffs and multidimensional considerations.

• Developing methods and systems that let researchers and institutions make better consequential decisions — from research design to statistical inference to algorithmic allocation.

• Understanding what publics actually prefer in high-stakes domains — asylum politics, economic austerity, and other politically divisive issue areas.

 

​As part of this research, he has developed methods for algorithmic and AI-based decision-making in refugee resettlement that have been implemented by agencies in the U.S., Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

 

Professor Bansak's peer-reviewed research has been published in top journals across multiple disciplines. This includes publications in general science outlets (Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour, PNAS Nexus), political science and political methodology (American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, Political Science Research and Methods, Legislative Studies Quarterly), operations research (Operations Research, Management Science, ACM Conference on Economics and Computation [EC]), and statistics and computer science (Statistical Science, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A, International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics [AISTATS], AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society [AIES]). ​

 

Professor Bansak is also a faculty affiliate of the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University and ETH Zurich, and a faculty affiliate of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI). He received a Ph.D. in Political Science and M.S. in Statistics from Stanford University, M.A. in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and B.A. in Anthropology from Harvard University.​​