Samuel Workman is a professor of political science and director of the Institute for Policy Research and Public Affairs in the John D. “Jay” Rockefeller School of Policy and Politics at West Virginia University. The Institute provides non-partisan research and analysis to state, county, and municipal officials in the Appalachian region. The Institute’s initiatives seek to build data infrastructure and information systems in the region to help facilitate data-driven decision-making in public policy and good governance, and aid in economic development.

His previous work has addressed public policy, regulation, and how governments use information. Current projects examine how policymaking systems generate and use information and how this relates to community resilience and development. His work emphasizes text-as-data, machine learning, and statistical modeling, especially classification. His area of expertise is constructing large data infrastructures to answer fundamental questions about public policy across time and space. He is a member of the West Virginia Economic Development Council. He writes on practical applications of data science and statistics at Towards Data Science and is a founding editor of 3Streams. In addition to editorial duty, he writes on rural politics and policy, including public policy in Appalachia. As part of his fellowship, he will examine spatial and temporal patterns of county and municipal spending in West Virginia and New York, and connect these to community well-being and resilience.