On the occasion of the EUI Degree Conferring Ceremony 2023, the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences conferred the Doctor Honoris Causa of the EUI to Professor Jens Hainmüller for his exceptional impact on political sciences through improvement of statistical methods, causal inference, as well as his research on immigration, political behaviour, and political economy.
Upon receiving the Doctor Honoris Causa, Hainmüller shared: "I have admired the EUI from afar. It has been really extraordinary to meet the brilliant faculty, and some of the excellent students here that are so passionate in terms of addressing some of the core issues with their research that Europe and the world are facing today."
Prior to the Conferring Ceremony, Hainmüller delivered the Max Weber Keynote Lecture 'How Can Democracies Facilitate the Integration of Newcomers? Building an Evidence and Innovation Agenda for Applied Migration Research' at the EUI on 14 June, followed by an interactive Q&A session with EUI faculty members and researchers on the following day.
In his keynote lecture, Professor Hainmüller described some of the work that his research team at the Immigration Policy Lab (IPL) has undertaken, including their collaborative efforts to build an evidence base that identifies which immigration policies work and which do not, based on the impacts of immigration policies and programmes.
Hainmüller outlined the the IPL team's research that aims to quantify the causal impacts of citizenship and their efforts to develop and implement human-centred AI to optimise the placement policies for refugees and asylum seekers.
On 15 June, the Q&A session, 'New approaches in empirical political research', chaired by Elias Dinas, Head of the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences, offered faculty, EUI alumni, and researchers the opportunity to ask Professor Hainmüller questions on academia, research advice, and the future of political and social sciences. On the latter, Hainmüller emphasised that in this new era, which has been increasingly dominated by AI, researchers should not feel intimidated "as theory in the field of social and political sciences needs to be further developed, and this is something in which we can leverage these technologies."
Jens Hainmüller is the Kimberly Glenn Professor in Political Science and Director of Graduate Studies of the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. He is the Faculty Co-Director of the Stanford Immigration Policy Lab, that focuses on the design and evaluation of immigration and integration policies and programmes.
Hainmüller has published over 65 articles, many of them in top science journals and field journals in political science, statistics, economics, and business. He has also published three open-source software packages and his research has received awards and funding from the Carnegie Corporation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Robin Hood Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Swiss SNF, the American Political Science Association, Schmidt Futures, the Society of Political Methodology, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the Midwest Political Science Association.
Hainmüller received his PhD from Harvard University and has studied at the London School of Economics, Brown University, and the University of Tübingen. Before joining Stanford, he served on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.