Me!

About Me

I’m a data analyst and researcher with a strong foundation in polling, data, technology, and the political sphere. I graduated from the University of Puget Sound with a double major in Computer Science and Politics & Government, and I’m passionate about how these fields intersect—especially in the service of progressive change. Throughout college, I built my leadership through community and teaching—representing my university in competitive programming competitions, serving as a Resident Assistant for multiple freshman communities, and working as a TA, tutor, and lead instructor.

During the 2024 election cycle, I worked at Clarity Campaign Labs, partnering with political campaigns, nonprofits, and advocacy groups to analyze polling data, identify shifts in public opinion, and support decision-making through dashboards, visualizations, and analysis. Whether I’m working with code, campaigns, or collaborators, I bring technical fluency, a clear analytical lens, and a deep belief in data as a tool for impact.


Things I've Written

Political Bias in Large Language Models

Gover, Lucas. 2023

The Commons Journal of Politics

Recent research has found that large language models consistently capture and replicate undesirable societal biases relating to race, religion, and gender. However, political bias is not well explored. This study investigates the political bias present in the state-of-the-art large language model GPT-3. To investigate political bias, I apply Natural Language Processing techniques to develop a political sentiment analysis model. Using this model, I analyze the ideological bias present in political essays written by GPT-3, finding that GPT-3 has a moderate left-leaning bias and tends to replicate the ideological bias of prompt text.

Some Cool Projects

Texas Legislature Data Pipeline

Tools Used
DBT
BigQuery
PREFECT
PYTHON

Streamlines legislative tracking for the Texas Legislature bills, providing quick access to bill information, reducing administrative burden for policy analysts, and helping activists coordinate.

Model Evalation for Political Campaigns

Tools Used
D3.js
HTML
JAVASCRIPT

Built an interactive data exploration using JavaScript and D3.js to illustrate how to compare statistical models for voter targeting. The interactive visualization walks users through key evaluation metrics, helping to demystify how to assess and compare models.

American Values Regression Tree

Tools Used
D3.JS
REACT.JS
PANDAS
FLASK

Website which visualizes how personal identities can shape political values. Users have the option to select which values and identities they are interested in. These selections are sent to a predictive model to better understand the relationships between them. The website renders this complex data in an easily understandable way, developing an intuitive yet detailed platform that can be used by both laymen and seasoned political scientists.

Movie Recommender

Tools Used
JAVA
D3.JS
Graph Algorithms
HTML5

This project was designed to generate a graph of movies from a movie review database using Graph Analysis Algorithms to find relationships between movies. I implemented Dijkstra's algorithm and the Floyd-Warshall algorithm to generate movie recommendations based on similarity scores. I created an efficient interface that allowed users to gain insights into the graph, navigating the similarities between movies. As part of this project, I wrote a visual representation of the graph with D3.js, which was designed to give users a visual understanding of the movie relationships.

Birdsong Deepfakes

Tools Used
TENSORFLOW
PYTORCH
PYTHON
SIGNAL ANALYSIS

I recently completed my capstone research project creating generative-adversarial neural networks to generate artificial birdsong. To evaluate the efficacy of this method, my teammates and I explored recurrent neural network and transformer GAN Architectures trained on birdsong scalagrams.

Solar System Lighting Simulation

Tools Used
OpenGL
GLSL
JOGL
JAVA

This JOGL model displays a three-dimensional solar system with lighting, shadows, and realistic textures. It is created using Phong Shading which gives it a more natural, realistic look. The orbits of the planets are represented around the sun, with the planets constantly spinning as they travel along their trajectories. The Solar Body textures, lighting, and size are described by the given .sol file, which can easily be varied.

Political Sentiment Analysis Research

Tools Used
NLP
TENSORFLOW
PYTHON
PANDAS
SPSS
SKLEARN

My senior politics capstone research on political bias in Large Language Models. I built and implemented a sentiment analysis model to analyze the political bias of the large language model GPT-3. My research furthers understanding of the potential societal biases represented in large language models and provides a means of measuring and understanding of these biases.

Books!

book, while reading

Currently Reading

I have the bad habit of reading too many things at once. Here's what I'm currently reading

The Words that Remain by Stênio Gardel

Big Data and Social Science by Ian Foster, Rayid Ghani, Ron S. Jarmin, Frauke Kreuter, and Julia Lane

The Lie Detectives by Sasha Issenberg

Full Reading List Here