Directors

Ed Fieldhouse

Ed Fieldhouse is Professor of Social and Political Science and the current Director of the Cathie Marsh Institute.

He completed a PhD at the University of Sheffield and joined The University of Manchester in 1993. Following a brief period in local government, he previously directed the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research from 2002 until 2005. In 2006 he was appointed as founding director of the Institute for Social Change and executive director of Social Change: a Harvard-Manchester Initiative. Since 2014 he has been principal investigator of the British Election Study.

His main research interests are voting behaviour, electoral geography, and social and contextual influences on electoral behaviour. He is co-author of over sixty scholarly articles and books on a diverse range of topics including voting behaviour and turnout, social capital, social inequality, unemployment and deprivation.

He also has extensive experience of working with non-academic stakeholders.

Nikita Basov

Nikita Basov is a senior lecturer in Network Analysis in the Department of Social Statistics and Deputy Director of the Cathie Marsh Institute. 

Nikita Basov is Senior Lecturer in Network Analysis at the Department of Social Statistics and Deputy Director of the Cathie Marsh Institute.
He received a PhD in Sociology from St Petersburg University in 2009. In 2005 - 2022 he was Lead Researcher at the Faculty of Sociology at St Petersburg University, and in 2013 - 2022 – Head of Science/Scientific Manger at the Centre for German and European Studies, St Petersburg University – Bielefeld University. 
His main interests and contributions include socio-semantic network analysis, structural and computational analyses of culture/meaning/ideas/worldviews in society, statistical modelling of network-ethnographic data, new statistical frameworks such as of nested societal levels and of complex cultural diffusion, core–periphery dynamics in society, co-dependencies between cognitive/mental/psychic mechanisms and social-network mechanisms, material embeddedness of social and symbolic structures.

Todd Hartman

Todd Hartman is Professor of Quantitative Social Science in the Department of Social Statistics and sits on the management board of the CMI as a representative as the head of Social Statistics. 

He completed a PhD in political psychology at Stony Brook University (New York) and previously worked at Appalachian State University (North Carolina) and the University of Sheffield, where he directed a survey research centre and behavioural lab, as well as the Sheffield Q-Step Centre.

His research explores the psychological underpinnings of public opinion and behaviour using methods of causal inference and computational social science. His work has been published in prestigious peer-reviewed academic journals such as Nature Communications, Scientific Reports, Psychological Medicine, Big Data & Society, British Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Social Psychological and Personality Science, Political Psychology, Political Communication, and The Geographical Journal.