Dennis Feehan feehan {at} berkeley.edu Department of Demography University of California, Berkeley 394 Social Science Building Berkeley, CA 94720-2120

I’m a demographer and quantitative social scientist.

My research interests lie at the intersection of networks, demography, and quantitative methodology. I’m currently an Associate Professor of Demography at the University of California, Berkeley. In the summer of 2015, I finished my Ph.D. at Princeton’s Office of Population Research, and I spent the fall of 2015 as a Research Scientist at Facebook.

Working papers

• Pre-analysis plan for ‘Estimating adult mortality using sampled social network data: evidence from Brazil’ (Working paper coming soon)
• Inequality and fairness: A networked experiment

Recent and forthcoming publications

• Using Multilevel Regression with Poststratification for Estimating Subnational Age-Specific Contact Patterns (accepted at PLoS Computational Biology)

• A sample size formula for network scale-up studies

• Survey methods for estimating the size of weak-tie networks

• In a stationary population, the average lifespan of the living is a length-biased life expectancy

• Estimating adult death rates from sibling histories: A network approach

• Quantifying population contact patterns in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic

• How do populations aggregate?

• Using an online sample to learn about an offline population; arxiv version

• Separating the signal from the noise: Evidence for deceleration in old-age death rates; arxiv version; R package and code

• The network survival method for estimating adult mortality: Evidence from a survey experiment in Rwanda

• Quantity Versus Quality: A Survey Experiment to Improve the Network Scale-up Method

• Generalizing the Network Scale-Up Method: A New Estimator for the Size of Hidden Populations

Updates

I was promoted! As of July 1, I am an Associate Professor at UC Berkeley.

I gave a talk estimating adult death rates from sibling histories on at the WHO Working Group on Mortality Estimation.

I co-organized the UC Berkeley Workshop in Formal Demography in May.

I gave a talk at the United Nations Statistical Commision 53rd Session side event: “Use of surveys and censuses to fill adult mortality data gaps in the context of COVID-19.” You can see a video of the event here.

I co-organized the IUSSP Expert Group Meeting on Population Data for the 21st Century at UNFPA in New York. Slides and videos of the talks will be posted on the website soon.

I very much enjoyed giving a talk at a panel presentation for UCLA’s Summer Institute in Computational Social Science.

I had a great visit to the University of Michigan, where I gave a talk for the Population Studies Center Brown Bag.

I had a wonderful visit to Ohio State, where I gave a talk at the PRI Seminar.

I’m thrilled to have been awarded the ASA Outstanding Article in Mathematical Sociology Award! Check out the paper, written with Matt Salganik, here (arxiv version here). Congrats to co-winners Joscha Legewie and Merlin Schaeffer for their work on contested boundaries.

I gave a keynote talk and tutorial at the pre-PAA workshop, ‘Demographic Research in the Digital Age’ (sponsored by IUSSP). I also gave two talks during the PAA conference.

I had a great visit to Duke, where I gave a talk at the DuPRI Seminar.

I gave a talk at the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences at the University of Washington, a wonderful group of researchers.

In June, I was invited to the US State Department, where I gave a talk hosted by the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

I had a great visit to UW Madison, where I gave a talk in their demography seminar on March 14th.

I was interviewed about our work on social network methods for estimating adult mortality by the Matrix.

Emilio Zagheni and I co-organized a workshop on Web, Social Media, and Cellphone Data for Demographic Research at SocInfo 2016.

I very much enjoyed visiting and giving a talk at the Stanford RAIN seminar series on November 2nd.