Galen Hall

About

I am a third year PhD student jointly between Physics and Sociology at the University of Michigan. My two wonderful advisors are Elizabeth Bruch and Mark Newman.

I often label myself as a computational social scientist working in the complexity science tradition; basically, I want to develop and use creative theoretical models, paired with well-defined and abundant observational data, to help social science become more predictive, mechanistic, interpretable, and one day paradigmatic.

I like big, rich, wacky datasets and network-based inferential methods and models. The road that brought me here crossed through physics, applied political philosophy, and the sociology and political science of climate change. I still love each of those areas and occasionally work in them, but I am most focused on doing creative empirical computational social science.

I also have ongoing collaborations in neural network interpretability, theoretical community ecology, climate modeling, and evolutionary biology. In my spare time I love oil painting, reading sci-fi and history books, learning to cook, and rock climbing, running, or biking as much as possible.

Research And Projects

I build and use computational models, network methods, and large observational datasets to study social systems. I am especially interested in interest groups, lobbying, climate politics, and how social science can become more predictive and mechanistic.

I also build InCite, a tool that recommends citations from your personal library as you write.

Working Papers

1. Indexing American Interest Groups. Galen Hall, Alex Garlick, and James Strickland. Working paper, 2026. Automated classification of state interest group populations using LLM-augmented semi-supervised learning, classifying over 25,000 organizations into 117 industry categories across all 50 U.S. states.
2. Multilayer Community Contribution. Galen Hall and Mark Newman. Working paper, 2025. Inferring the contribution each layer makes to the community structure of a multilayer network, using a Bayesian Poisson stochastic block model with size-aware priors.

Published and Accepted Papers

1. The American Corporate Elite in the Twenty-First Century: Cohesive or Fragmented? Mark S. Mizruchi and Galen Hall. In María Luisa Méndez, Mike Savage, and Annette Lareau, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Global Elites. Oxford Handbooks, New York, NY, 2026; online edn., Oxford Academic, 3 Apr. 2026. Chapter.
2. MetaOthello: A Controlled Study of Multiple World Models in Transformers. Aviral Chawla, Galen Hall, and Juniper Lovato. Accepted to ICML, 2026. Paper. Scholar.
3. Where Ideology Meets Private Interest: The Three-part Composition of Climate Obstruction in the United States. Galen Hall, L. Loy, Robert J. Brulle, K. Schell-Smith, M. M. Hu, and S. Trollback. Environmental Research Communications, 2024. Paper.
4. Climate Coalitions and Anti-coalitions: Lobbying across State Legislatures in the United States. Galen Hall, T. Culhane, and J. T. Roberts. Energy Research & Social Science, 2024. Paper.
5. CHORUS: A New Dataset of State Interest Group Policy Positions in the United States. Galen Hall, J. A. Basseches, R. Bromley-Trujillo, and T. Culhane. State Politics & Policy Quarterly, 2024. Paper. See also howdotheylobby.org.
6. Climate Policy Conflict in the US States: A Critical Review and Way Forward. J. A. Basseches, R. Bromley-Trujillo, M. T. Boykoff, T. Culhane, Galen Hall, N. Healy, D. J. Hess, and J. C. Stephens. Climatic Change, 2022. Paper.
7. Who Delays Climate Action? Interest Groups and Coalitions in State Legislative Struggles in the United States. T. Culhane, Galen Hall, and J. T. Roberts. Energy Research & Social Science, 2021. Paper.
8. Obstructing Action: Foundation Funding and US Climate Change Counter-Movement Organizations. Robert J. Brulle, Galen Hall, L. Loy, and K. Schell-Smith. Climatic Change, 2021. Paper.
9. Ethical Choices Behind Quantifications of Fair Contributions Under the Paris Agreement. K. Dooley, C. Holz, S. Kartha, S. Klinsky, J. T. Roberts, H. Shue, H. Winkler, T. Athanasiou, S. Caney, E. Cripps, N. K. Dubash, Galen Hall, P. G. Harris, B. Lahn, L. Moellendorf, B. Muller, A. Sagar, and P. Singer. Nature Climate Change, 2021. Paper.

Public Writing

1. The faulty science, doomism, and flawed conclusions of Deep Adaptation. Galen Hall, Thomas Nicholas, and Colleen Schmidt. openDemocracy, 2020. Critical response to Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy. Featured in The New York Times. Article.

Talks

1. Climate Coalitions and Anti-coalitions: Lobbying in the U.S. States. American Sociology Association Conference, Philadelphia, PA, August 2023.
2. Disentangling Politics and Policymaking: Interest Group Coalitions and Parties in the American States. Southern Political Science Association Conference, St. Pete Beach, FL, January 2023.
3. Power in numbers: insights from new data on lobbying in the United States. Complex Systems Advanced Academic Workshop Series, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, January 2023.
4. Unveiling Interest Group Preferences in the American States. Consortium for American Political Economy Conference, Online, June 2022.
5. Unveiling Interest Group Preferences in the American States. State Politics and Policy Quarterly Conference, Tallahassee, FL, May 2022.

CV

Education

• Ph.D. in Physics and Sociology (Joint). University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2023-present. Pre-candidate for Ph.D. GPA: 4.0. Courses include Social Theory 1 and 2, Social Demography, Economic Sociology, Intro. to Adaptive Systems, Network Science, and Econometrics 1 and 2.
• Sc.B. in Physics (Honors). Brown University, 2016-2020. GPA: 3.93. Honors: Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, nominated for Sigma Xi.
• Visiting Student. Oxford University, 2018-2019. Focus: Physics and Philosophy. GPA: 4.0 converted.

Work Experience

• Researcher (Full-time). Climate and Development Lab, Brown University, March 2020-July 2023. Supervisor: Professor Timmons Roberts.
• Researcher (Part-time). Climate and Development Lab, Brown University, July 2019-March 2020. Supervisor: Professor Timmons Roberts.
• Researcher (Part-time). The Ethics of Geoengineering Project, Harvard University, June 2018-September 2018. Supervisor: Professor Lucas Stanczyk.
• Researcher / Software Developer (Full-time). Brown Graphics Lab, Brown University, March 2017-March 2018. Supervisor: Professor Andy Van Dam.

Grants

• NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. $147,000, 2023. Fellowship funding three years of graduate school stipend and tuition.
• CSSN Research Grant. $26,000, 2021. PI: Galen Hall. Research on climate policy and interest groups at the state level, with Joshua Basseches and Rebecca Bromley-Trujillo. Funding source: Climate Social Science Network.
• Brown University SPRINT Award. $2,000, 2020. PI: Baylor Fox-Kemper. Summer research extending undergraduate thesis results and preparing for academic article submission.