Postdoctoral Researcher at Harvard University and Northeastern University
About Kristin Lunz Trujillo
My name is Kristin ("Krissy"), and I'm a postdoctoral research fellow at the Covid States Project. I have formal affiliations at the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy, and at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University. I'm also an affiliate of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University. Starting August 2023, I will be an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of South Carolina.
My research adopts a political psychology framework to explore rural-urban differences in political behavior and public health, as well as vaccine-related misinformation and attitudes. My current primary project investigates rurality as a social identity in contemporary politics: how such a rural identity is unduly confounded with the white working class, as well as its relation to populism, immigration, political participation, and health and science attitudes.
In addition, I have studied attitudes about health policy and false information, particularly those relating to vaccines. I began this line of research pre-pandemic, and have since investigated COVID-19 behaviors, policies, and vaccine attitudes - especially as a postdoc for the COVID States Project.
You can find my published work in academic journals such as Political Behavior, Political Geography, Political Research Quarterly, Social Science & Medicine, the International Journal of Public Opinion Research, and the Journal of Rural Health, among others. My research has won the Best Paper in the Health Politics and Policy section of APSA (and an honorable mention in another year), as well as the best article award at the International Journal of Public Opinion Research and at the Journal of Rural Health. My work has also been featured in places such as Newsweek, Forbes, FiveThirtyEight, and more. In addition, I've written journalistic pieces that have appeared in many outlets, including Time and US News and World Report. Formerly, I was a full-time Visiting Instructor of Political Science at Carleton College - ranked #1 for liberal arts colleges in undergraduate teaching by US News - while completing my PhD in Political Science with a minor in political psychology at the University of Minnesota (conferred August 2021).
