Alauna Safarpour

Dr. Alauna Safarpour is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics, and Public Policy. She earned her Ph.D. in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland in 2021. Her research areas of interest include race and ethnic politics, public opinion, and participation. Specifically, her research focuses on creating better citizens by reducing prejudice and increasing civic participation. Her work has been published by Political Behavior, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, The Washington Post, and the Kaiser Family Foundation. Dr. Safarpour’s dissertation entitled “Taking Perspective: Prejudice Reduction and Political Attitudes” develops and tests a theory of how to reduce anti-Black prejudice and the impact of doing so on American political attitudes. Her research has been funded by several competitive grants including an American Political Science Association/ National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant. She was the 2020 polling fellow at The Washington Post where she surveyed the American public on the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 Presidential Election. She also worked for the Kaiser Family Foundation assisting in public opinion research concerning the COVID-19 vaccine. In 2021 Dr. Safarpour joined the COVID States Project at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University and the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University as a postdoctoral fellow where she researches attitudes and behaviors concerning the coronavirus pandemic. Her work focuses on the attitudes of racial and ethnic minorities and encouraging compliance with public health measures.