Stephen Pettigrew

I am the Executive Research Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies and the Deputy Executive Director of UPenn’s Fox Leadership Program. I am also a Senior Analyst for the NBC News Decision Desk and Data Analytics Lab.

At Penn, I teach undergraduate data science courses which focus on data visualization, GIS, web scraping, experiments, web app development, and other advanced topics. I also oversee research being conducted by students through the Fox Leadership program. I work with and mentor students each semester on projects that develop their technical skills and substantive knowledge about politics.

As a Senior Analyst for the NBC News Decision Desk, I help to project the winners in elections for federal and statewide offices. One of my major responsibilities developing new statistical models to use on Election Night. I have helped to redesign the user interface of proprietary Election Night software and worked with our team’s software engineers to implement the changes. I have also developed data dashboards that are customized to the needs of a particular election. Since 2020, I have run NBC’s House Desk and led a team of analysts to projected the winner in all 435 Congressional races and majority control of the chamber. I led the Decision Desk’s delegate allocation process during the 2020 and 2024 presidential primaries.

My political science research addresses questions about voting accessibility and the way we administer elections in the United States. My work informs broader discussions about access to the ballot, race, representation, and effective governance. More recently, I have studied ranked choice voting and its consequences. My research has been published in several peer-reviewed journals including Science, Electoral Studies, and Political Science Quarterly.

In addition to my work in political science, I have applied my data science skills to research about analytics in football, basketball, hockey and the Olympics. This research has been published in peer-reviewed journals, and I have been a contributor to the Wall Street Journal, FiveThirtyEight, and Deadspin.

I received a PhD in political science and Masters in statistics from Harvard University. I am a proud graduate of University of Georgia, receiving a Masters degree in political science and Bachelors degrees in political science and history. I worked as a project manager and data scientist with the MIT Election Data and Science Lab.