About

CoronaData U.S. is a nationally representative survey, administered daily, of U.S. public opinions, behaviors, and attitudes related to the COVID-19 pandemic, assembled by a team of social scientists at Northwestern University.


Our Team

Northwestern Faculty

Principal Investigator:

Beth Redbird is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research and the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at Northwestern University. Her expertise is in public opinion, segregation and loneliness, and survey methodology.

Areas: Questions about the project; Household Response; Financial Well-Being and Work; Public Policy Response.

Rachel Davis Mersey is a professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School. There she also serves as the associate dean for research. She is the author of two books. Mobile Disruptions, with co-authors in the U.S. and the Middle East, examines the state of and opportunity for mobile media innovations in the Gulf states. And Can Journalism Be Saved? still stands as a formative argument recasting local news efforts as community-driven initiatives. Rachel is working on another book, under contract with Columbia University Press, on the media consumption habits of elites with attention to the implications for community-building and democracy.

Areas: Information and Media Consumption.

Tabitha Bonilla studies political behavior and communication and broadly examines how elite communication influences voter opinions of candidates and political policies. In particular, her work focuses on how messaging polarizes attitudes or can bridge attitudinal divides.  

Areas:   Information and Media Consumption; Public Policy Opinions.

James N. Druckman is the Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science and a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University. He is a co-Principal Investigator of Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences and sits on the American National Election Studies Advisory Board.

Areas: Information and Media Consumption; Public Policy Opinions; Pro-Social Behavior.

Laurel Harbridge-Yong is an Associate Professor of Political Science and a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on party conflict in Congress, the challenges to reaching policy compromises, and how the public views partisanship and conflict among their elected representatives.

Areas: Public Policy Opinions.

Andrew V.  Papachristos is currently Professor of Sociology and the Director of the Northwestern Network and Neighborhood Initiative. Papachristos aims to understand how the connected nature of cities—how their citizens, neighborhoods, and institutions are tied to one another—affect what we feel, think, and do. 

Areas: Relationships and Networks.

Thomas McDade, PhD, is the Carlos Montezuma Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University.  His research focuses on understanding how social, economic, and cultural contexts shape human biology and health over the life course.

Areas: Health and Stress.

Angela Y. Lee is the Mechthild Esser Nemmers Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. She is a Fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, a Fellow of the American Psychological Society, and a Marketing Science Institute Academic Fellow. Her research focuses on consumer motivation and persuasion, cross-cultural consumer psychology, and nonconscious influences of memory on judgment and choice.

Areas: Public Policy Opinions; Pro-Social Behavior.

Christine Percheski, PhD, is an associate professor of sociology and faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. Percheski’s research investigates how changes in family demography are intertwined with economic inequality in the United States, with a focus on women and children. She has published research on a range of topics relevant to the current global crisis, including employment patterns, health insurance coverage, health care access, fertility responses to economic recessions, and economic inequality.

Areas: Household Response; Financial Well-Being and Work; Public Policy Response.

David N. Rapp is a Professor in the School of Education and Social Policy and the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University. His research examines the cognitive mechanisms responsible for successful learning and for knowledge failures, with recent work documenting the consequences of exposures to inaccurate information. 

Areas: Information and Media Consumption; Public Policy Opinions; Pro-Social Behavior.

Laura Doering is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto. As an economic sociologist, she studies how interactions and social psychological processes shape outcomes for households, organizations, and markets.

Areas: Household Response; Financial Well-Being and Work.

Angelina Grigoryeva is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her research examines household economic lives and implications for wealth and gender inequalities in the context of large-scale transformations, such as financialization of the US economy and the aging of the US population.

Areas: Household Response; Financial Well-Being and Work.

Tymofii Brik is an assistant professor of policy research at Kyiv School of Economics and an editor of VoxUkraine. Received Ph.D. from Carlos III of Madrid (Spain), MSc from Utrecht University (the Netherlands), and MSc from Kyiv Taras Shevchenko National University (Ukraine). In Spring 2018 I was a visiting Vucinich fellow at Stanford Center of Russian, Eastern European, and European Studies. In 2019-2020 he was a Fulbright visiting fellow at the NYU sociology department.

Areas: Household Response; Financial Well-Being and Work; Public Policy Response.

Northwestern Graduate Students

Kat Albrecht is a JD/PhD Candidate in Sociology at Northwestern University, a Law and Science Fellow at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, and a Research Affiliate at the Duke University Center for Firearms Law. Kat’s work sits at the intersection of computational social science and law, where she uses innovative computational techniques to study school gun violence, felony murder, Title IX policy, and racial disparity in arrest. 

Areas: Public Policy Response, Agency Response.

Carrie Stallings is a first year PhD student at Northwestern University and a Data Science Consultant at Northwestern’s Office of Research Computing Services. Her research focuses on income and wealth inequality, particularly on the roles that government and educational institutions play in the life outcomes of Black and Indigenous peoples.

Areas: Public Policy Response.

John Lee is a PhD candidate in sociology at Northwestern University. His research interests include social psychology, inequality, race/ethnicity, and public opinion.

Areas: Public Policy Response, Information and Media Consumption.

Zhihang Ruan is a PhD candidate in political science at Northwestern University. His research interests include political economy, development and aid, labor, politics of China and Vietnam, and U.S.-China relations.

Areas: Public Policy Response, Public Policy Opinions.

Arielle Tolman is a JD/PhD Candidate in Sociology at Northwestern University, a Law and Science Fellow at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, and a Doctoral Fellow at the American Bar Foundation. Her research on the sociology of law and medicine focuses on the intersection of health and criminal law and public health law. Her scholarship has been published in peer-review and law review journals, including The Lancet, Schizophrenia Bulletin, and the Northwestern University Law Review

Areas: Public Policy Response, Agency Response.

Wayne Rivera is second year PhD graduate student In Sociology at Northwestern University and a Research Fellow at the Northwestern Neighborhood and Networks Initiative (N3). His research merges a focus on the sociology of knowledge, social networks, and diagnosis in the study of mental health and trauma. 

Areas: Health and Stress; Information and Media Consumption.