Rate My Professor Lonna Jenke

Libby Jenke is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Houston, where she has been appointed since 2019. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University in 2018 under the advisement of John Aldrich and Michael Munger, and her B.A. in Political Science from Duke University in 2010. During her graduate studies, Jenke was a member of Scott Huettel's neuroscience laboratory within Duke's Psychology and Neuroscience department. Prior to her faculty position, she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Duke University from 2018 to 2019. Additionally, she served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Harvard University from 2024 to 2025 and as a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania from 2025 to 2026. She teaches courses in political psychology.

Jenke specializes as a quantitative methodologist, focusing on causal inference, experimental methods, and political behavior. Her research employs eye-tracking, mouse-tracking, and conjoint experiments to examine voter decision processes, attention and information acquisition, affective polarization, misinformation beliefs, gender biases in candidate evaluation, and issue salience. Prominent publications include Jenke and Sullivan (forthcoming), 'Attention and Political Choice: A Foundation for Eye Tracking in Political Science,' Political Analysis; Jenke (2025), 'An Eye-Tracking Study of Gender Biased Information Acquisition in Candidate Evaluation,' Political Psychology 46(3), 673-690; Jenke, Johnston, and Madson (2025), 'An Assessment of Citizens’ Capacity for Prospective Issue Voting using Incentivized Forecasting,' Quarterly Journal of Political Science 20(1), 1-31; Jenke (2024), 'Affective Polarization and Misinformation Belief,' Political Behavior 46, 825-884; Jenke and Munger (2022), 'Attention Distribution as a Measure of Issue Salience,' Public Choice 191(3), 405-406; Jenke, Bansak, Hainmueller, and Hangartner (2021), 'Using Eye-Tracking to Understand Decision-Making in Conjoint Experiments,' Political Analysis 29, 75-101; Jenke and Huettel (2017), 'Cognitive foundations of voter choice,' Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20(11), 794-804; and Jenke and Gelpi (2017), 'Theme and variations: Historical contingencies in the causal model of interstate conflict,' Journal of Conflict Resolution 61(10), 2262-2284. Her scholarship has garnered over 400 citations on Google Scholar. Jenke has received prestigious funding, such as a $483,300 grant from the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2024), $5,000 from Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science (2024), $4,000 from the Institute for Humane Studies (2023), and $6,000 from the University of Houston New Faculty Research Award Program (2020).