I am a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Pittsburgh. In fall 2024, I will be joining the Department of International Affairs at the University of Georgia as an Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in the School of Public Health. I received a Ph.D in Political Science from the University of Washington in June 2022.

My research interests include international law, international political economy, norms, political psychology, text as data, and the politics of crisis. In my book project, which is based on my dissertation, I examine the factors that lead states to exit international agreements. I argue that there are two distinct patterns of treaty exit, and it can either function as a form of norm-contestation or as an alternative to non-compliance under the treaty.

My interest in decision-making amid change and pressure, as well as my enthusiasm for working in teams to better understand contemporary problems, led me to work with other political scientists and public health researchers to track US state responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. This widely-cited research has been published in Nature Medicine, Perspectives on Politics, The Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, and State Politics & Policy Quarterly.

As part of my post-doc, I work on two different interdisciplinary teams which use computational methods to address ongoing challenges in social sciences.  The first project deepens and improves our measurement of state human rights’ records, while the second project examines place-based disinformation related to COVID-19 and elections.

Methodologically, I am interested in computational methods, especially for text analysis, as well as survival modeling, interviews, and case studies. I especially enjoy the challenge of working on data collection in rapidly changing domain areas, which necessitates re-evaluation of the study population, data collection process, and ontology.

I can be reached by email at breebangjensen at gmail dot com or blb166 at pitt dot edu.