Gary King is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard University—one of 25 with Harvard's most distinguished faculty title—and Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. In the Department of Government, his work spans political science subfields including American Politics, Comparative Politics, International Relations, and Methods and Formal Theory. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz (B.A., 1980) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (M.A., Ph.D., 1984), King taught at New York University for three years before joining Harvard in 1987.

King develops and applies innovative empirical methods across social sciences, bridging statistical theory and practical application. Notable contributions include ecological inference methods to infer individual behavior from aggregate data, used in Voting Rights Act enforcement; the partisan symmetry standard and detection methods for partisan gerrymandering; anchoring vignettes for cross-cultural survey comparability, employed in over 100 countries; and politically robust designs for large-scale randomized experiments, such as the evaluation of Mexico's universal health insurance program and a major U.S. news media study. His book Designing Social Inquiry, co-authored with Robert O. Keohane and Sidney Verba, launched the modern subfield of qualitative methods in political science; Unifying Political Methodology played a similar role for quantitative methods. The article "Replication, Replication" (1995) sparked the data sharing movement in political science, bolstered by his international Dataverse project. An elected Fellow of eight societies—including the National Academy of Sciences, American Statistical Association, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and others—he has received more than 55 awards. King served as President of the Society for Political Methodology, Vice President of the American Political Science Association, on the Senior Editorial Board of Science, as Visiting Fellow at Oxford, and Senior Science Adviser to the World Health Organization. Listed as the most cited political scientist of his cohort and among those with the most important theoretical contributions to the field, he has authored over 190 journal articles, 30 open-source software packages, and 8 books. King co-founded technologies behind Crimson Hexagon, Learning Catalytics, and others, securing 17 patents.

Professional Email: king@harvard.edu