Research

The Center is excited to support new research projects that are policy relevant. Caltech researchers with innovative ideas in new policy-relevant research should contact the co-directors for additional information.

As of 2024, the Center's research activities focus on substantive areas where there is strong scientific interest at Caltech: climate change and sustainability, biotechnology and bioethics, and the ethics of artificial intelligence. In each substantive area, the Center collaborates with other Caltech research centers, in particular the Resnick Sustainability Institute, the Ronald and Maxine Linde Center for Global Environmental Science, the Center for Social Information Sciences (CSIS), and the Merkin Institute for Translational Research.

The LCSSP's research efforts center around developing and sustaining new scientific studies at Caltech in these thematic areas that focus on each topic's unique ethical implications, policy impacts, and scientific communication. The Center's founding co-directors work closely with Center postdoctoral researchers, as well as Caltech faculty and students, to produce novel and unique research contributions in these areas. In addition, the Center organizes and hosts workshops and conferences that present these research products and help to better connect Caltech researchers and policymakers.

Here are some examples of policy-relevant publications by scholars affiliated with LCSSP:

• "Integration of Weather, Traffic, and Air Pollution Data in Norway" (2024) by Cong Cao, forthcoming Scientific Data.
• "Using Support Vector Machine and Decision Tree to Predict Mortality Related to Traffic, Air Pollution, and Meteorological Exposure in Norway" (2024) by Cong Cao, Jan Morten Dyrstad, and Colin P. Green, forthcoming Scandinavian Journal of Public Health.
• "Rich Data Variables: Integration of Ten Years of Daily Weather, Traffic, and Air Pollution Data Across Six Largest Norwegian Cities" (2024) by Cong Cao, Science Data Bank.
• "Physics-Based Deep Learning Reveals Rising Heating Demand Heightens Air Pollution in Norwegian Cities" (2024) by Cong Cao, Ramit Debnath, and R. Michael Alvarez, arXiv.
• "How to Better Predict the Effect of Urban Traffic and Weather on Air Pollution? Norwegian Evidence from Machine Learning Approaches" (2024) by Cong Cao, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.
• "The Common Microfoundations of Attitudes Toward Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Globalization" (2024) by Beatrice Magistro, Sophie Borwein, R. Michael Alvarez, Bart Bonikowski, and Peter J. Loewen, SSRN.
• "Evaluating the Quality of Answers in Political Q&A Sessions with Large Language Models" (2024) by R. Michael Alvarez and Jacob Morrier, arXiv.org.
• "Identifying American Climate Change Free Riders and Motivating Sustainable Behavior" (2024) by Ramit Debnath, Beatrice Magistro, Cecilia Abramson, Danny Ebanks, and R. Michael Alvarez, Scientific Reports.
• "Trust in Scientists and their Role in Society across 67 Countries" (2024) by Viktoria Cologna, Niels G. Mede, Sebastian Berger, John Besley, Cameron Brick, Marina Joubert, Edward Maibach, Sabina Mihelj, Naomi Oreskes, Mike S. Schäfer, and Dr. Sander van der Linden (Ramit Debnath and R. Michael Alvarez participated in this paper, relevant to their work on trust in science & science comms), preprint undergoing peer review.
• "Attitudes Toward Automation and the Demand for Policies Addressing Job Loss: The Effects of Information about Trade-Offs" (2024) by Beatrice Magistro, Peter Loewen, Bart Bonikowski, Sophie Borwein, and Blake Lee-Whiting, Political Science Research and Methods.
• "The Effect of Misinformation Intervention: Evidence from Trump's Tweets and the 2020 Election" (2023) by Zhuofang Li, Jian Cao, Nicholas Adams-Cohen, and R. Michael Alvarez, Conference paper, Disinformation in Open Online Media, 5th Multidisciplinary International Symposium, MISDOOM 2023, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, November 21–22, 2023, Proceedings.
• "Do Fossil Fuel Firms Reframe Online Climate and Sustainability Communication? A Data-Driven Analysis" (2023) by Ramit Debnath, Danny Ebanks, Kamiar Mohaddes, Thomas Roulet, and R. Michael Alvarez, npj Climate Action.
• "Large Language Models and Political Science" (2023) by Mitchell Linegar, Rafal Kocielnik, and R. Michael Alvarez, Frontiers in Political Science.
• "Issue Responsiveness in Canadian Politics: Are Parties Responsive to the Public Salience of Climate Change in the Question Period?" (2023) by R. Michael Alvarez and Jacob Morrier, Political Research Quarterly.
• "Why Don't Americans Trust University Researchers and Why It Matters for Climate Change" (2023) by R. Michael Alvarez, Ramit Debnath, Daniel Ebanks, PLOS Climate.
• "Generative AI and the Future of Elections" (2023) by R. Michael Alvarez, Frederick Eberhardt, and Mitchell Linegar.
• "Conspiracy Spillovers and Geoengineering" (2023) by Ramit Debnath, David M. Reiner, Benjamin K. Sovacool, Finn Müller-Hansen, Tim Repke, R. Michael Alvarez, and Shaun D. Fitzgerald, iScience.
• "COVID-Dynamic: A Large-Scale Longitudinal Study of Socioemotional and Behavioral Change Across the Pandemic" (2023) by Tessa Rusch, Yanting Han, Dehua Liang, Amber R. Hopkins, Caroline V. Lawrence, Uri Maoz, Lynn K. Paul, and Damian A. Stanley, Scientific Data.
• "Facilitating System-Level Behavioural Climate Action Using Computational Social Science" (2023) by Ramit Debnath, Sander van der Linden, R. Michael Alvarez, and Benjamin K. Sovacool, Nature Human Behavior.
• "Social Media Enables People-Centric Climate Action in the Hard-to-Decarbonise Building Sector" (2022) by Ramit Debnath, Ronita Bardhan, Darshil U. Shah, Kamiar Mohaddes, Michael H. Ramage, R. Michael Alvarez, and Benjamin K. Sovacool, Scientific Reports.
• "The Politics of Vaccine Hesitancy in the United States" (2021) by Jian Cao, Christina M. Ramirez, and R. Michael Alvarez, Social Science Quarterly.
• "How (Not) to Reproduce: Practical Considerations to Improve Research Transparency in Political Science" (2021) by R. Michael Alvarez and Simon Heuberger, PS: Political Science & Politics.
• "Dynamic Social Media Monitoring for Fast-Evolving Online Discussions" (2021) by Maya Srikanth, Anqi Liu, Nicholas Adams-Cohen, Jian Cao, R. Michael Alvarez, and Anima Anandkumar, KDD '21: Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining.
• "Finding Social Media Trolls: Dynamic Keyword Selection Methods for Rapidly-Evolving Online Debates" (2019) by Anqi Liu, Maya Srikanth, Nicholas Adams-Cohen, R. Michael Alvarez, Anima Anandkumar, AI for Social Good workshop at NeurIPS.

Here is an example of unpublished work by scholars affiliated with LCSSP:

• APSA 2023 presentations on carbon tax research and on election attacks from Beatrice Magistro, Sreemanti Dey, Daniel Ebanks, and R. Michael Alvarez.