Alauna Safarpour

Alauna, a visiting postdoctoral fellow in the Lazer Lab, earned her Ph.D. in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland in 2021. Her research areas of interest include race and ethnic politics, public opinion, and participation. Specifically, her research focuses on creating better citizens by reducing prejudice and increasing civic participation. Her work has appeared in Political Behavior, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, and The Washington Post.

Dr. Safarpour’s dissertation entitled "Taking Perspective: Prejudice Reduction and Political Attitudes" develops and tests a theory of how to reduce anti-Black prejudice and the impact of doing so on American political attitudes. Her research has been funded by several competitive grants including an American Political Science Association/ National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant.

She was the 2020 polling fellow at The Washington Post where she surveyed the American public on the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 Presidential Election. She is currently a contractor for the Kaiser Family Foundation assisting in public opinion research concerning the COVID-19 vaccine.

In 2021 Dr. Safarpour joined the COVID States Project at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University as a postdoctoral fellow where she researches attitudes and behaviors concerning the coronavirus pandemic.  Her research focuses on the attitudes of racial and ethnic minorities and encouraging compliance with public health measures.