Christy Coulson

Christy is a third-year PhD candidate supervised by Dr Thomas Robinson (Department of Methodology) and Dr Ryan Hübert (Department of Methodology). He is also a Graduate Research Affiliate at the International Relations and Data Science research group based at ETH Zürich. Christy previously held research assistantship roles at LSE’s CPEC and University of Oxford’s DPIR. Christy holds a BA in International Relations from the University of Exeter (2016), an MSc in Conflict Resolution and Governance from the University of Amsterdam (2017) and an MSc in Applied Social Data Science from LSE’s Department of Methodology (2023).

Christy is a social data scientist and political scientist. His research focuses on translating, innovating, and applying advanced ML and interpretable ML methods to the study of social phenomena. Specifically, Christy is interested in the tension between explanation, inference, and prediction in the context of ML strategies and seeks to understand how we can leverage the predictive fidelity of advanced ML while maintaining the explanatory and inferential qualities of more deductive methods. Christy applies black-box ML methods and seeks to develop ways to substantively infer in the context of these models. Recently, Christy has focused on utilising interpretable machine learning techniques to boost the policy relevance of predictions and to uncover hidden sources of treatment effect heterogeneity under experimental conditions.

Christy’s current substantive research focus is conflict. He is concerned with understanding the determinants of intra- and inter-state warfare, variations in actor strategies at differing levels of conflict, and the role that new technologies play in the onset, continuation, and resolution of conflicts. He is also interested in examining interstate aggression and competition through the lens of prediction and inference.

Christy was the recipient of both the 2024/25 Department of Methodology Class Teacher Award and the 2025 LSE Summer School Class Teacher Award. In addition to academia, Christy has spent several years in the data science and advanced analytics practices across a variety of industries, from capital markets to intellectual property.

Working Papers

1. Schubiger, L., Myers, E., de Marchi, S., Dorsey, S., Coulson, C. “Mobilization for Equality: Norm Change and Backlash.” Working paper, 2025.
2. Coulson, C., “Using Shapley Values to Generate Theories in Political Science.”, 2025.
3. Coulson, C., “Explaining Predictions with Shapley Values for Political Science Research,” 2025

Class teacher for MY451 (Introduction to Quantitative Analysis), MY464 (Introduction to Quantitative Methods for Media and Communications), MY474 ( Applied Machine Learning for Social Science) and ME314 (Introduction to Data Science and Machine Learning).