Paige Bollen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science. She is a scholar of political methodology and comparative political behavior. Her research interests are driven by questions related to the political effect of context and contact. She explores three interrelated questions: How do our lived experiences complement or contradict information from the media, friends, and family? How does the built environment shape the content of these everyday experiences? And how can we leverage new methods and data sources to measure context and model its effect better? She combines big-data analyses and machine learning methods with causal inference to study these questions, with regional cases primarily in sub-Saharan Africa.