Michelle Bueno Vásquez

Welcome! I’m Michelle, a political science Ph.D candidate and applied statistics MS candidate at Northwestern. I study the politics of race and inequity with a focus on the Afro-Latino diaspora in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. My research centers on statistical invisibility for marginalized communities and on identifying better ways to gather and measure quantitative data for racial minorities. I also study the institutionalization of racial hierarchies and categories, including how governments and elites construct racial denominations that do not necessarily represent the communities they enumerate.

Methodologically, I work across survey analysis, statistical modeling, text-as-data, OCR-assisted archival research, automated qualitative coding, and reproducible R/Python research pipelines.