David Shor
David Shor
Early Life & Education
David Shor was grew up in a Jewish family in Miami, Florida. He is the son of a Rabbi and a Doctor. Growing up, Shor was a math prodigy and finished high school at the age of 13. In 2009, Shor was awarded a full scholarship to study pure mathematics in Russia. He studied Graduate Math in the Math in Moscow program, which is a partnership with the Independent University of Moscow and the Russian Higher School of Economics. While Shor enjoyed the experience, he decided that he wasn't smart enough to pursue pure math as a career. In 2010, Shor graduated from Florida International University with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics at the age of 17. [1] [5][10]
Career
David Shor began his career in political data science volunteering for the campaign of Kendall Van Dyk a Montana Democrat running for Montana Senate in 2010. Shor developed a Bayesian GOTV (Get Out the Vote) system that combined disparate party databases, creating probabilistic partisanship estimates for every registered voter in Van Dyk’s district. Van Dyk ended up defeating a popular Republican incumbentby four votes, one of only two Democratic Montana State Legislature candidates in the entire country to unseat a Republican incumbent in 2010. [1]From 2010-2011, Shor worked as a Visiting Student Research Collaborator at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. Within the field of neuroscience, 3D reconstruction, event detection, dendrite modeling, psychometrics. She is a quantitative political scienceand data analysis-produced race and district level forecasts in 513 races for 2010 election. He helped design, create, and analyze a survey studying the heritability of autism. [1]In 2008, Shor founded Stochastic Democracy, a political forecasting company based in Miami. He produced the most accurate election forecasts for 2008, 2009, and 2010 US elections, as well as the 2009 Israeli and 2011 Canadian Elections. Stochastic Democracy was used as an outlet for dissemination of work by the statistics community regarding the forensic analysis of the 2009 Iranian Presidential Election. Shor corresponded with state election offices to build a multi-state voter database for polling and statistical purposes. He built an interactive voice response pollster that automated political surveys for candidates and nonprofits. [1] [8]In 2012, Shor worked as a Battleground State Elections Analyst in the Barack Obama's 2012 presidential campaign. He developed and maintained the the campaign's election forecasting system, The Golden Report, which accurately predicted the outcome to within a point in every state and was the primary input to the campaign's resource allocation decisions. He was involved in the development, rollout, and quality control of the largest polling operation in history with over 1.5 million people polled. He worked with campaign leadership and field to produce multiple new kinds of models and tools to solve problems ranging from optimal office placement to dynamic resource optimization. [5] [2][9][5] After Barack Obama won the election, Google founder, Eric Schmidt saw the work David Shor and the Obama's analytics team as valuable and offered them seed money to start an analytics company, which became Civis Analytics. [9]Since December 2012, Shor has been the Head of Political Data Science at Civis Analytics. He led thesurvey methodology for the company's polling operation. Shor also worked in operationalizing and interpreting dozens of large randomized controlled trials. He developed an automated forecasting/decision-making product that is used by large swathes of Democratic party leadership to help them win. Shor took a lead role organizing the company's research and development strategy. He lead the development of the VoteWithMe app, which helped volunteers turn out their friends in the 2016 presidential election. He also managed a cross-office research and development team focused on measurement and decision science. [1]