I’m fascinated by the way people think and act in relation to politics. I’ve gone from Cote d’Ivoire, Lebanon, Montreal, Toronto, and now Morocco in the aim to better understand it. After delving into the theory and historical side of politics with my BA and MA, I focused on big data and formal models during my PhD in order to find trends, correlations and causes in the way people behave politically. For this reason, my regional expertise lies in the Middle East and North Africa region but my scientific research cuts across various countries. ​In fact, my current research revolves around three topics of social inquiry: social movements, migration, and public opinion. On the first topic, I lead a team of researchers between political and computer sciences to generate measures of social movement activities and predict events like protests using social media data. Some of our work is currently in revise and resubmit in leading social science journals, and the business side of this project is being formalized into the start-up “Maidan”. On the topic of migration, I work with the Social Development team of Europe and Central Asia at the World Bank to generate scientific research on the effect of climate change and pandemics on forced displacement. ​On the topic of public opinion, I wrote my doctoral dissertation along with a few papers that were published in peer reviewed venues. My research on this topic was based entirely on survey data from the Middle East and North Africa region–thank you Arab Barometer and World Values Survey! Theoretically speaking, I explored the impact of systems, measured by societal level variables, on formal models of opinion formation originally designed with the implicit assumption that they largely rest on individual level dynamics. Links to my publications on this topic are available in the publications section of my website along with more tangible, “real world”, implications to my findings. Prior to my current appointments, I pursued my PhD in political science at the University of Toronto (Canada) where I was a Junior Fellow at Massey College for the duration of my doctoral studies. In the past, I also worked on refugee resettlement with the Lebanese Embassy in Cote d’Ivoire during the 2011 episode of the local civil war and conducted ethnographies of the Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon. My research is generously supported today by DFID-UNHCR-World Bank group. In the past, I was lucky to count on the support of the University of Toronto–Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS)– and the Social Science Research Council of Canada–Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship Program (Doctoral Scholarship).