Jay Ulfelder

Independent Research Consultant and Advisor, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Jay Ulfelder is a political scientist whose research interests include democratization, political violence, social unrest, state collapse, and forecasting methods. He received his Ph.D. in from Stanford University in 1997 and his B.A. in Comparative Area Studies (USSR and Eastern Europe) from Duke University in 1991. From 2001 to 2011, Ulfelder served as research director for the Political Instability Task Force, a U.S. government-funded research program that develops statistical models to forecast various political events around the world. He now makes a living as a consulting researcher and has spent most of the past three years working with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide to develop the Early Warning Project, a public early-warning system for mass atrocities around the world. His blog, Dart-Throwing Chimp, won the International Studies Association’s Best Blog (Individual) Award in 2014 and 2015.