We are fortunate and excited to share that James Houghton, PhD, has joined our team at The Turnout. He will serve as an Operations Research Scientist and work to support our elections clients and others who can benefit from James’s systems engineering expertise.

James recently earned his PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Rhode Island (URI), where he also received his master’s and bachelor’s degrees in the field.

James has acquired significant election technology experience while pursuing his educational goals at URI, both while working on his dissertation research, "Executing Advanced Algorithms to Extrapolate Voter Arrival Behavior in U.S. Elections", and master’s thesis, "Estimating Voter Arrival Rates using Electronic Poll Book Transaction Logs", and through his work as a Graduate Research Assistant (GRA) for the Engineering for Democracy Institute (formerly URI VOTES) at URI.

As a GRA for the Institute, James created open-source tools for election administrators to streamline the analysis of machine log data from previous elections to provide actionable insights for future election planning. James also developed statistical and simulation models to assist local election administrators with resource allocation and capacity planning, impacting approximately 28.6 million voters across nine states and various other election technology and administration research efforts.

The Turnout team was lucky enough to work with James—and Institute Director Gretchen Macht, PhD—on election technology and operations research support efforts at the Engineering for Democracy Institute.

We look forward to James engaging with our clients, so you’ll hear more from James soon. Welcome!