Welcome, I’m Nitheesha!

Hello! I am the Senior Research Specialist at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance (NCGG) at Princeton University. In this role, I serve as the center’s Data Science Specialist. I advise researchers on political economy projects, answering methodological questions, and teaching applied computational methods. I also maintain the Sovereign Finance Lab database, managing the end-to-end data pipeline including wrangling multi-modal data, cleaning, aggregation, and documentation.

Previously, I received my PhD in Political Science and Social Data Analytics at Pennsylvania State University. I also served as a Research Associate and Adjunct Researcher at the RAND Corporation where I was part of the Women, Peace and Security Initiative in conjunction with the United States Cyber Command. My broader research addresses key questions regarding model improvement and evaluation, inequality, and the risks and opportunities of AI/emergent technologies in modern American politics. I apply a variety of computational social science methods in my research. My methodological interests include machine learning, LLMs, natural language processing, network analysis, causal inference and time series analysis.

I previously received a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Economics with a minor in French at the University of Connecticut. I went on to receive a Master of Arts in Sociology at Stony Brook University. At SBU I developed an interest in media and political discourse which evolved into my Sociology Master’s thesis which examines the role of satire in political framing. I later received my Master of Arts in Political Science at Pennsylvania State University and for this thesis I used machine learning and text analysis to examine how state legislators’ identity mediates the abuse they receive online. This thesis evovled into a published paper which evaluates the performance of foremost LLM-based toxicity detection tools. The through line of all my pursuits is my commitment to rigorous, reproducible methods at the intersection of data science and political science research.

Please contact me at nitheesha.nakka@princeton.edu for any further questions and inquires, thank you for visiting!