Rich Nielsen is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He studies and teaches on religion, conflict, gender, and research methods with a focus on digital media.  His first book, Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics, 2017), uses statistical text analysis and fieldwork in Cairo to show that understanding Muslim clerics as academics helps explain why some turn to preaching political violence while most do not. His research has been published in the Annual Review of Political Science, Journal of Politics, International Studies Review, Deadalus, Political Analysis, International Studies Quarterly, American Journal of Political Science, Sociological Methods and Research, and other outlets. You can read more about him here (https://www.mit.edu/~rnielsen/).