Iliyan Iliev

Welcome to my web page. I am an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern Mississippi, where I was chosen for the 2020-2022 University Faculty Fellowship and the 2020-2021 Junior Faculty Award. I was recently awarded a $1.4 million grant by the Department of Defense's Minerva Research Initiative. The project, titled “Resurgent Powers, Nontraditional Threats, and Emerging Technologies: Deterrence in a Multilevel Network Framework”, focuses on nontraditional threats and deterrence. Together with colleagues from UC Davis, I develop a multilevel network approach that incorporates a variety of subnational, transnational and interstate domains together with traditional government actors to study a wide variety of conflict.

My published work appears in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Interest Groups & Advocacy, Political Science Quarterly, The Social Science Journal, IEEE Access, Significance, Environmetrics, and elsewhere. 

I am one of the co-founders of the Institute for Advanced Analytics and Security (IAAS), a permanent interdisciplinary group focused on conducting basic science research, product and curriculum development, and the creation of a research lab staffed by undergraduate and graduate students.

My research focuses on uncovering complex social and political dynamics, and the development of novel research methods to study such interactions.

Social and Political Dynamics

My three general areas of interest are contributions/legislative behavior, terrorism/protests/societal instability, and voting/electoral participation.

Research Methodology

My research agenda required the creation of a number of innovative methodological tools. I developed natural language processing algorithms that were used in my work on legislative behavior/campaign contributions and my work on terrorism. I also participated in the development of a space-time dynamic clustering algorithm, which allows the automatic selection of tuning parameters when clustering.

You can find my Google Scholar page here. 

Click here for my CV