D. Sunshine Hillygus is professor of political science and public policy at Duke University, where she directs the Duke Initiative on Survey Methodology and codirects the Polarization Lab. She is coauthor of Making Young Voters: Converting Civic Attitudes into Civic Action(Cambridge University Press, 2020), The Persuadable Voter: Wedge Issues in Presidential Campaigns (Princeton University Press, 2008) and The Hard Count: The Political and Social Challenges of Census Mobilization(Russell Sage Foundation, 2010). She serves as associate PI of the American National Election Studies and previously served on the Census Scientific Advisory Committee. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and private foundations. Hillygus earned a PhD in political science from Stanford University and a BA in political science and Spanish from the University of Arkansas.
Hillygus’s project, “Redesigning Social Media to Reduce Partisan Animosity,” will examine the ways in which the current information environment incentivizes the production and sharing of misleading characterizations of public opinion. She will use a series of experiments to evaluate how the functionalities and features of a social media platform shape the way users evaluate and share information.
May 2024
