Team

Directors

Zachary Elkins
Zachary Elkins is an associate professor in UT Austin’s Department of Government. His research focuses on democracy, institutional reform, research methods, and national identity. With Tom Ginsburg (University of Chicago), he co-directs both the Comparative Constitutions Project, an NSF-funded initiative to understand the causes and consequences of constitutional choices, and Constitute, which provides resources for constitutional drafters. He earned his BA from Yale University, MA from UT Austin, and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Roy Gardner
Roy Gardner is a data scientist focused on natural language processing, networks, and machine learning. He is a researcher for the Comparative Constitutions Project and a PeaceTech researcher at the PeaceRep consortium led by the University of Edinburgh Law School. He has a BSc in Experimental Psychology and a PhD in Neuroscience. His post-doctoral work was on algorithms for automatic speech recognition and experimental studies of human speech perception.

Ashley Moran
Ashley Moran is a political scientist focused on comparative constitutional development, court elaboration of new constitutions, and divided societies. She is research director for the Comparative Constitutions Project and a lecturer in UT Austin’s Government Department. Previously, she worked on democratic, legal, and constitutional reform in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Middle East for NDI and the OSCE. She has an MA in Comparative Law and Development Economics from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a PhD in Government from UT-Austin.

Senior Research Analysts

Andrés Cruz
Andrés Cruz is a PhD student in the Department of Government and an MS student in the Department of Statistics and Data Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. He studies political methodology with applications in comparative politics. His research interests include data quality, measurement error, and computational social science. He received a BA and MA in Political Science from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

Matthew Martin
Matthew Martin is a PhD student in UT Austin’s Department of Government. He studies public law and comparative politics, focusing on public participation in constitution-making, authoritarian regimes, Latin American politics, indigenous constitutionalism, and immigration politics. He has worked with the Comparative Constitutions Project since 2021. Previously, he was a full-time legal assistant in family and humanitarian immigration law. He received a dual-degree BA in Legal Studies and Political Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Guillermo Pérez
Guillermo Perez is a Chilean lawyer and a PhD student in UT Austin’s Department of Government. During his career, he has worked as a researcher and lecturer in different think tanks, research centers, and universities in Chile. He has also been actively contributing to the Chilean constitutional reform process, advising members of the Constitutional Convention and the Constitutional Council, and participating in multiple public debates. His research interests are comparative constitutional law, constitutional design, and Latin American politics.