Ashrakat Elshehawy

Assistant Professor,
University College London
a.elshehawy@ucl.ac.uk

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I am an Assistant Professor at University College London (UCL). I hold a PhD in Politics from the University of Oxford. I was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, King Center on Global Development. I was a visiting researcher at Yale during my PhD. I finished my Bachelor and Master at the University of Mannheim, focusing on Advanced Quantitative Methods. My research has been published in the Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, and Journal of Peace Research.

My research focuses on Identity, Development, and Computational Social Sciences. I study how ethnic, religious, and cultural identities shape political behavior, information environments, and long-run development outcomes. I employ and advance methods of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in a multilingual setting, working with a variety of Western and Arabic languages. My work incorporates the retrieval and digitalization of maps, textual data, and various other sources of data. I am passionate about utilizing my computational skills to generate new sources of quantitative data that reveal valuable information that would be otherwise unused.

I am currently a Faculty Fellow at the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS) and the Governance and Local Development Institute (GLD) of the University of Gothenburg.

I come from Alexandria, Egypt. I am a former professional swimmer for the Egyptian Swimming National Team, for which I competed professionally for several years. I still find myself thinking more clearly while doing all those endless laps at the pool.