Ben Gebre-Medhin’s scholarly interest focuses on the relationship between universities, academics and the development of modern states. His recently published work concentrates on higher education in American political development, and his forthcoming book asks how a handful of wealthy, elite, private universities in the U.S. came to compete over free virtual courses during the MOOC movement. Prior to completing a postdoc at Stanford University, his work was supported by the U.S. Department of Education (Javits Fellowship) and the National Academy of Education (NAEd/Spencer Foundation). In addition to historical and interview methods, he has used machine learning on text data to unlock new insights into traditional social science questions.
Areas of Expertise
Organizations, education, science and technology, data science, and computational text analysis
Education
- Ph.D., M.A., University of California, Berkeley
- B.A., Dartmouth College
