Education

• Ph.D in Political Science and Communication, University of Pennsylvania, 2025 (expected)
• M.A. in Statistics and Data Science, The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, 2023
• M.A. in Communication, The Ohio State University, 2020
• B.A. in English Literature, Cornell University, 2014, summa cum laude

Research

Keeping Humans in the Loop: Human-Centered Automated Annotation with Generative AI

Nicholas Pangakis and Samuel Wolken (2024). Keeping Humans in the Loop: Human-Centered Automated Annotation with Generative AI. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.

Political Narratives in Evangelical Sermons

With Marc Jacobs, Sean Westwood, and Yphtach Lelkes.

The diminishing state of shared reality on US television news

With Homa Hosseinmardi, David Rothschild, and Duncan Watts.

The Rise of and Demand for Identity-Oriented Media Coverage

Hopkins, D. J., Lelkes, Y., & Wolken, S. (2024). The rise of and demand for identity‐oriented media coverage. American Journal of Political Science.

Knowledge Distillation in Automated Annotation: Supervised Text Classification with LLM-Generated Training Labels

Nicholas Pangakis and Samuel Wolken. 2024. Knowledge Distillation in Automated Annotation: Supervised Text Classification with LLM-Generated Training Labels. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science (NLP+CSS 2024), pages 113–131, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Increased Fox News Viewership Is Not Associated with Heightened Anti-Black Prejudice

With Daniel J. Hopkins and Yphtach Lelkes.

Talks

Research Priorities in the Era of AI

April 26, 2024

Talk at Political and Information Networks Workshop, Philadelphia, PA

The rise of and demand for identity‐oriented media coverage

April 03, 2023

Talk at Department of Political Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst, seminar on Causal Inference, Amherst, MA (via Zoom)

Teaching

Race and Ethnic Politics (TA, Spring 2023)

Introduction to American Politics (TA, Fall 2022)

Political Communication (TA, Fall 2021)

Principles of Strategic Communication (TA, Spring 2020)

Communication Research Methods (TA, Fall 2019)

Principles of Strategic Communication (TA, Spring 2019)

History of Communication (TA, Fall 2018)

Service, leadership, and community

• 10th International Conference on Computational Social Science, University of Pennsylvania, 2024: Program Committee, Local Committee
• Summer Institute in Computational Social Science, University of Pennsylvania, 2024: Organizer, Treasurer
• Co-creator of gpt_annotate, open-source software that helps researchers use and validate GPT models for text annotation

Work experience

• June - August 2019: Graduate student intern
  • Langer Research
  • Contributed to all aspects of public opinion research, including the Washington Post/ABC News poll
• September 2016 - August 2018
  • Forrester Research
  • Bylined contributor to more than 40 research papers on consumer behavior
• June 2014 - August 2018
  • Glover Park Group (now FGS Global)
  • Junior associate on strategic communications campaigns for corporate, governmental, and NGO clients