Ryan Rohrbach is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science. He graduated from the University at Buffalo in 2025 with a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and International Studies. His research interests primarily include using applied mathematics to study how authoritarian governments and backsliding democracies design political institutions, the use of formal modeling to understand structural problems in data, and the political psychology of intergroup prejudice. Broadly, Ryan’s work asks when governments create institutional responses to citizen behavior and how theoretical social science can improve empirical research, especially when the institutions under study create structural data issues that limit traditional empirical methods. Outside of school, Ryan enjoys cooking, playing video games, and reading dystopian fiction.
