Jake Bowers is a professor in the Departments of Political Science and Statistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His methodological research focuses on the design and analysis of both randomized experiments and non-randomized observational studies in the service of understanding human behavior and improving public policy. His substantive work includes research on COVID vaccination attitudes in the USA, tax behavior and attitudes in Malawi, and the perceptions of group relationships in neighborhoods in Canada.

He currently serves as the Methods Director for the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) network and co-founder and co-director of the new Arnold Ventures Criminal Justice Research network.

Since 2015 he has worked at the intersection of social and behavioral science, applied statistics of causal inference, and public policy with the Office of Evaluation Sciences in the General Services Administration of the US Federal Government (during 2015 the OES was publicly known as the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team), The Policy Lab @ Brown University, as a Research Affiliate and Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, where he co-founded the Causal Inference for Social Impact Lab together with Carrie Cihak, and as a co-founder of Research4Impact, an organization that connects researchers and practitioners to improve public policy, governance, and advocacy. He also helped create the first Latin American Political Methodology meeting in Santiago, Chile in 2017.

Some of his work with EGAP led to an online textbook on field experiments: The Theory and Practice of Field Experiments: An Introduction from the EGAP Learning Days, with translations into Spanish and French. He teaches about causal inference and experiments in the EGAP Learning Days in Latin America as well as in the Escuela de Invierno de Metodods.

You can see one measure of the impact of his scholarly work on his Google Scholar profile