Neil Fasching

Hello! I’m Neil Fasching. I’m a computational social scientist and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. I received a Master’s degree in Statistics and Data Science from The Wharton School in 2023.

My research has focused on public opinion, partisan animosity, political communication, and open science practices, with publications in Science Advances, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Communication, Journal of Personality, and Political Psychology, among others. This work developed my expertise in experimental design, causal inference, statistical modeling, machine learning, and natural language processing.

I’m also interested in AI evaluation and bias detection, auditing large language models to uncover systemic biases. For example, my recent publication at ACL highlighted large disparities in hate speech detection (HSD) across seven LLM-based systems.

My PhD dissertation combines these two research interests and examines topic diversity, misinformation, and toxicity on popular political podcasts. I utilize and validate LLM-based models for tasks ranging from transcription and classification to content moderation and textual embeddings.

My CV is available as a PDF.