Galen Hall

About

I am a PhD student jointly between Physics and Sociology at the University of Michigan. My two wonderful advisors are Elizabeth Bruch and Mark Newman.

I often label myself as a computational social scientist working in the complexity science tradition; basically, I want to develop and use creative theoretical models, paired with well-defined and abundant observational data, to help social science become more predictive, mechanistic, interpretable, and one day paradigmatic.

I like big, rich, wacky datasets and network-based inferential methods and models. The road that brought me here crossed through physics, applied political philosophy, and the sociology and political science of climate change. I still love each of those areas and occasionally work in them, but I am most focused on doing creative empirical computational social science.

I also have ongoing collaborations in neural network interpretability, theoretical community ecology, climate modeling, and evolutionary biology. In my spare time I love oil painting, reading sci-fi and history books, learning to cook, and rock climbing, running, or biking as much as possible.

Research And Projects

I build and use computational models, network methods, and large observational datasets to study social systems. I am especially interested in interest groups, lobbying, climate politics, and how social science can become more predictive and mechanistic.

Under Review

1. Interest Groups in the American States: 1969-2024. Alex Garlick, Galen Hall, and James Strickland. Under review, 2026.
2. Centrality and Power in Social Networks. Mark S. Mizruchi and Galen Hall. Under review for the Handbook of Mathematical Sociology, edited by Elisa Jayne Bienenstock and Matthew Brashears, Edward Elgar Publishing.

Working Papers

1. Multilayer Community Contribution. Galen Hall and Mark Newman. Working paper, 2025. Inferring the contribution each layer makes to the community structure of a multilayer network, using a Bayesian Poisson stochastic block model with size-aware priors.

Published and Accepted Papers

1. The American Corporate Elite in the Twenty-First Century: Cohesive or Fragmented? Mark S. Mizruchi and Galen Hall. 2026. In María Luisa Méndez, Mike Savage, and Annette Lareau (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Global Elites, pp. 636-653. Oxford University Press. Published online April 3, 2026. Chapter.
2. MetaOthello: A Controlled Study of Multiple World Models in Transformers. Aviral Chawla, Galen Hall, and Juniper Lovato. 2026. Accepted to the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026). Paper.
3. Where Ideology Meets Private Interest: The Three-part Composition of Climate Obstruction in the United States. Galen Hall, Loredana Loy, Robert J. Brulle, Kennedy Schell-Smith, Ming-May Hu, and Stina Trollback. 2024. Environmental Research Communications, 6(8), 081003. Paper.
4. Climate Coalitions and Anti-coalitions: Lobbying across State Legislatures in the United States. Galen Hall, Trevor Culhane, and J. Timmons Roberts. 2024. Energy Research & Social Science, 113, 103562. Paper.
5. CHORUS: A New Dataset of State Interest Group Policy Positions in the United States. Galen Hall, Joshua A. Basseches, Rebecca Bromley-Trujillo, and Trevor Culhane. 2024. State Politics & Policy Quarterly, 24(3), 322-347. Paper. See also howdotheylobby.org.
6. Climate Policy Conflict in the U.S. States: A Critical Review and Way Forward. Joshua A. Basseches, Rebecca Bromley-Trujillo, Maxwell T. Boykoff, Trevor Culhane, Galen Hall, Noel Healy, David J. Hess, David Hsu, Rachel M. Krause, Harland Prechel, J. Timmons Roberts, and Jennie C. Stephens. 2022. Climatic Change, 170, 32. Paper.
7. Who Delays Climate Action? Interest Groups and Coalitions in State Legislative Struggles in the United States. Trevor Culhane, Galen Hall, and J. Timmons Roberts. 2021. Energy Research & Social Science, 79, 102114. Paper.
8. Obstructing Action: Foundation Funding and US Climate Change Counter-Movement Organizations. Robert J. Brulle, Galen Hall, Loredana Loy, and Kennedy Schell-Smith. 2021. Climatic Change, 166, 17. Paper.
9. Ethical Choices Behind Quantifications of Fair Contributions Under the Paris Agreement. Kate Dooley, Ceecee Holz, Sivan Kartha, Sonja Klinsky, J. Timmons Roberts, Henry Shue, Harald Winkler, Tom Athanasiou, Simon Caney, Elizabeth Cripps, Navroz K. Dubash, Galen Hall, Paul G. Harris, Bård Lahn, Darrel Moellendorf, Benito Müller, Ambuj Sagar, and Peter Singer. 2021. Nature Climate Change, 11, 300-305. Paper.

Public Writing

1. The faulty science, doomism, and flawed conclusions of Deep Adaptation. Galen Hall, Thomas Nicholas, and Colleen Schmidt. openDemocracy, 2020. Critical response to Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy. Featured in The New York Times. Article.

Talks

1. Where Does Inferred Structure Come From? Attribution in Networks and Machine Learning. SFI Informal Seminar, Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM, October 28, 2026. Host: Max Jerdee.
2. MetaOthello: A Controlled Study of Multiple World Models in Transformers. Lightning talk, WM@Booth: Workshop on World Models, Chicago, IL, September 1, 2026. Listed under Aviral Chawla; presented by Galen Hall. Program.
3. Machine Learning for Discovery: Uncovering Novel Preference Configurations in Online Dating. American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Decision-Making, Social Networks, and Society Section / Middle-Range Theorizing and Its Empirical Tests, New York, NY, August 8, 2026. With Jett Rosen and Elizabeth Bruch. Program.
4. What Makes a Layer Important? Measuring Layer Contributions to Multilayer Community Structure. Contributed talk, Statistical Inference for Network Models, NetSci 2026 Satellite Symposium, Boston, MA, June 2, 2026. Program.
5. Climate Coalitions and Anti-coalitions: Lobbying in the U.S. States. American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, August 2023.
6. Disentangling Politics and Policymaking: Interest Group Coalitions and Parties in the American States. Southern Political Science Association Conference, St. Pete Beach, FL, January 2023.
7. Power in numbers: insights from new data on lobbying in the United States. Complex Systems Advanced Academic Workshop Series, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, January 2023.
8. Unveiling Interest Group Preferences in the American States. Consortium for American Political Economy Conference, Online, June 2022.
9. Unveiling Interest Group Preferences in the American States. State Politics and Policy Quarterly Conference, Tallahassee, FL, May 2022.

CV

Download CV (PDF). Updated November 10, 2026.

Education

• Ph.D. in Physics and Sociology (Joint). University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2023-present. Pre-candidate for Ph.D. GPA: 4.0. Courses include Social Theory 1 and 2, Social Demography, Economic Sociology, Intro. to Adaptive Systems, Network Science, and Econometrics 1 and 2.
• Sc.B. in Physics (Honors). Brown University, 2016-2020. GPA: 3.93. Honors: Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, nominated for Sigma Xi.
• Visiting Student. Oxford University, 2018-2019. Focus: Physics and Philosophy. GPA: 4.0 converted.

Work Experience

• Researcher (Full-time). Climate and Development Lab, Brown University, March 2020-July 2023. Supervisor: Professor Timmons Roberts.
• Researcher (Part-time). Climate and Development Lab, Brown University, July 2019-March 2020. Supervisor: Professor Timmons Roberts.
• Researcher (Part-time). The Ethics of Geoengineering Project, Harvard University, June 2018-September 2018. Supervisor: Professor Lucas Stanczyk.
• Researcher / Software Developer (Full-time). Brown Graphics Lab, Brown University, March 2017-March 2018. Supervisor: Professor Andy Van Dam.

Grants

• NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. $147,000, 2023. Fellowship funding three years of graduate school stipend and tuition.
• CSSN Research Grant. $26,000, 2021. PI: Galen Hall. Research on climate policy and interest groups at the state level, with Joshua Basseches and Rebecca Bromley-Trujillo. Funding source: Climate Social Science Network.
• Brown University SPRINT Award. $2,000, 2020. PI: Baylor Fox-Kemper. Summer research extending undergraduate thesis results and preparing for academic article submission.

Service

• Admissions Committee Member. Department of Sociology, University of Michigan, 2025.
• Coordinator, Economic Sociology Working Group. University of Michigan, 2024-2025.
• Co-organizer, Climate Social Science Interdisciplinary Workshop. University of Michigan, 2024-2025. Supported by funding from Rackham Graduate School.