Shayla F. Olson

Hello!

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science and Scientific Computing, and a Master’s student in Statistics, at the University of Michigan. My expertise spans across the fields of American political behavior, political communication, and quantitative methods. I use tools such as surveys, experiments, and computational text analysis to examine questions within the areas of racial and ethnic politics and religion and politics.

In my research, I seek to understand how our identities and group attachments shape the way we interpret political events and evaluate political leaders. My current work investigates the extent to which religious group attachments are intertwined with racial attitudes.

My work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Politics & Religion and the Review of Religious Research, and has been supported by numerous grants, including the Rapoport Family Foundation Dissertation Research Grant.