CV & Bio

Jonathan N. Katz is the Kay Sugahara Professor of Social Sciences and Statistics at Caltech. His research develops statistical methods for the social sciences and uses them to answer substantive questions in political economy and political behavior, with a particular focus on elections and the evaluation of electoral systems.

He is Deputy Editor for Social Sciences at Science Advances (since 2018) and previously served as co-editor of Political Analysis (2010–2017). At Caltech, he chaired the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences from 2007 to 2014 and has long been involved with the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project.

Katz has been an academic advisor to Jupiter Asset Management since 2023 and is the principal of Katz Statistical Consulting. He has also worked extensively on how quantitative evidence is generated and evaluated in election litigation: more than 50 cases in state and federal court since 1999, several of them ultimately decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. He has held other data-science and advisory roles in industry.

Katz is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an inaugural fellow of the Society for Political Methodology. The Society gave him its 2024 Career Achievement Award. He earned his S.B. in applied mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, he joined the Caltech faculty in 1995, spending 1998–2000 at the University of Chicago.