Robert Kubinec received his PhD in 2018 from the University of Virginia. His research advances our understanding of the role of politically-connected firms in influencing both policy and regime type in developing countries. He has developed methods to advance online survey research to cover firm-level analysis, which has helped produce new data on politically-connected firms, corruption and democratization in the Middle East. In addition, Robert is developing new measurement models that can be applied to the study of social media, legislatures and other big data sets via Bayesian inference.