Splash Biography



BRANDEN BOHRNSEN, Keck Research Fellow and UCLA senior




Major: Political Science

College/Employer: UCLA

Year of Graduation: 2024

Picture of Branden Bohrnsen

Brief Biographical Sketch:

Hi! I'm a graduating senior and undergraduate researcher at UCLA. I have participated in the Research Revealed and Political Science Departmental Honors Programs, and am an awardee of the Rosalind W. Alcott and Keck Humanistic Inquiry awards. My research interests are in climate politics and quantitative methods. Outside of research, I am a hobbyist game developer, active in ACM Studio at UCLA.



Past Classes

  (Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

H302: Exploring Social Problems with Quantitative Methods in Splash Spring 2024 (Apr. 20, 2024)
Much like with medicine, scientists can run "experiments" on people to find solutions to social problems. This comes with the daunting question of how we can properly evaluate these experiments to get scientifically valid results. We'll tackle this problem by exploring an experiment, ran by a UCLA professor, that aimed to reduce prejudice between religious groups by putting people on mixed soccer teams. This class would be great for future social science majors hoping to get a taste of what data methods are used in experimental work, as well as for those interested in pursuing statistics or data science with real-world applications. We'll cover very basic R scripting (no programming experience necessary) and various estimation methods to determine the true effect of intervention on social outcomes. If we have time, we'll explore some cool statistical tricks like controls to make our results more robust.