School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences
The University of Texas at Dallas
Incoming Postdoctoral Researcher, Erasmus University Rotterdam (June 2025)
Shreyas Meher
About
I am a PhD Candidate in Public Policy & Political Economy at the University of Texas at Dallas and an incoming Postdoctoral Researcher at Erasmus University Rotterdam (starting June 2025). My research examines how governments control political speech in digital spaces, the role of economic and political institutions in shaping international cooperation, and how large language models can enhance event data collection.
Broadly, my work explores:
- Censorship & Digital Governance: How regimes use internet control, legal frameworks, and platform policies to shape online discourse.
- International Political Economy: The politics of investment treaties, populist-driven economic exits, and network effects in international organizations.
- Political Conflict & Event Data: Using machine learning and reinforcement learning to improve structured conflict event classification.
Methodologically, I specialize in computational approaches to political text analysis, reinforcement learning for structured output generation, and the application of large language models (LLMs) to political science. I developed ConfliBERT and ConflLlama, fine-tuned models for political event classification, and am currently building an RL-based annotation framework using Deepseek’s GRPO.
Current Research
ConfliBERT Project
Research Assistant with Dr. Patrick Brandt (2022-present)
Developing state-of-the-art language models for analyzing political conflict and violence.
Dissertation
“Democracy and Internet Control: Theory and Evidence from Transparency Reports”
An analysis of content moderation and electoral accountability across regime types.