Principal Investigator

Jaime Settle

Professor Settle is a Professor of Government at the College of William & Mary. In June 2012, she received her PhD from the University of California, San Diego. She is a scholar of American political behavior, interested in understanding the way that the American public experiences politics on a day-to-day basis. More specifically, her research focuses on how political interactions—in both face-to-face and online contexts—affect the way individuals perceive conflict in their environment, evaluate other people, and engage within the political system. She uses the core methodological tools employed in our discipline, but she is also interested in integrating tools from other disciplines—such as behavior genetics and psychophysiology—to inform our approach in understanding key questions within political science.

Lab Members

Nikita Chellani

Cooper Ferguson

Cooper (‘26) is a Computational and Applied Mathematics and Statistics (CAMS) major who joined the lab in 2025. His first project was the Podcast Project, which examined political language in popular podcasts. He is currently on a project exploring how the news media frame threats to democracy. In his personal research, Cooper focuses on using time-series analysis techniques to comprehend various phenomena with a focus on energy issues.

Mona Garimella

Wengfay Ho

Wengfay (’26) joined the SNaPP lab in 2023 and is majoring in psychology and government. She has conducted independent political psychology research on social media and adolescent polarization with a first-year Monroe Scholar research grant. In the SNaPP lab, Wengfay is part of the US DEED research team. 

Elliott Lee

Marisa MacDonald

Marisa (’27) joined the lab in Spring 2025 and is majoring in Data Science and Government.  She first worked on the US DEED Project, and is now working on a system to scrape state-level legislation for democratic erosion. She is also independently researching US presidential campaign behavior using NLP techniques. Outside of SNaPP, she is passionate about Ceramics and Boston Sports.

Emilia Murphy

Emilia (’27) joined the lab in 2025 and is majoring in government and data science. She supported the lab’s U.S. DEED pilot and is currently working with the book review team. Emilia is also pursuing an independent project about euphemistic language and politically violent rhetoric in online spaces. Beyond SNaPP, she enjoys hiking, drinking coffee, and traveling.

Shivi Royal

Shivi (’26) is a Computational Applied Mathematics & Statistics major (CAMS). She joined the lab in spring 2025 with experience in data modeling, machine learning, and statistics. Her first project at SNaPP was the Podcast Project, which leveraged NLP techniques to understand how polarization affected political and apolitical podcasts. Currently, Shivi works on the US DEED project, finding ways to automate the detection of democratic erosion in written state legislation. 

Sarah Schulte