Ritwik Bhardwaj

computational social science, statistics, political institutions

Ritwik Bhardwaj in Seattle

i am a master's student in applied statistics at penn state where i work as a graduate researcher on problems in political science and AI, advised by dr. bruce desmarais. i graduated in mathematics from the ohio state university in spring 2026, where i worked on large-scale analytics of supreme court writ petitions with dr. janet box-steffensmeier and dr. sahar abi-hassan (tulsa). at penn state, i think a lot about how "influencers" actually "influence", especially in election campaigns: political ads, polarization, and graph machine learning. i am also interested in applying these tools to indian politics with dr. irfan nooruddin (georgetown), understanding recent state assembly elections' political party dynamics and manifestos.

research

2026 — present
graph machine learning, platform incentives, polarization smeal college of business + department of political science, penn state

i am trying to identify different regulations that affect how influencers act as political actors in the public sphere. this extends to analyzing the structure of the social media platforms themselves, and how they incentivize certain behaviors. it is even more exciting as the use of AI has become increasingly prevalent: AI-produced speeches, ads, and bots joining social media discourse.

2025 — present
large-scale data analytics, supreme court, methodology american institutions & methodology (aim) lab, the ohio state university

i lead custom nlp efforts to categorize and analyze 100,000+ supreme court writ petitions. i have 3+ manuscripts in review/progress with dr. janet box-steffensmeier, dr. sahar abi-hassan, and dr. dino p. christenson.

summer 2025
ai engineering, agents sarvam

contributed to production infrastructure for multilingual LLM agents, and explored image and video processing capabilities for agents. sarvam is one of the leading AI companies in india.

publications & working papers

[1]
Ritwik Bhardwaj, Ian Stanton, Sahar Abi-Hassan, Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier, Dino P. Christenson, Chandler L'Hommedieu. “Weakly Supervised Topic Modelling of Large Legal Corpora: Evidence from the U.S. Supreme Court Petitions” Under review
[2]
Sahar Abi-Hassan, Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier, Dino P. Christenson, Chandler L'Hommedieu, Laura Berente, Ritwik Bhardwaj, Haikal Bin Rozaidi, Ian Stanton, Enan Srivastava. “Beyond the Plenary Docket: A Supply-Side Account of Certiorari Petitions” Out soon · Presented at Law & Courts'26, APSA'26 Boston
[3]
Sahar Abi-Hassan, Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier, Dino P. Christenson, Chandler L'Hommedieu, Ritwik Bhardwaj, Ian Stanton. “Temporal Analysis of Certiorari Petitions: A Case Study of the U.S. Supreme Court” In progress · expected Fall 2026

contact

rqb5746@psu.edu
state college, pa