Abstract: Important insights into redistricting can be gained through an interdisciplinary approach that combines research from many fields, including statistics, operations research, computer science, high performance computing, math, law, and political science. Our work integrates insights from all of these disciplines to create a novel approach for analyzing and reforming redistricting in a way that is tightly coupled with the framework that the Supreme Court has outlined over the past 5 decades.
Wendy K. Tam Cho is Professor in the Departments of Political Science, Statistics, Asian American Studies, and the College of Law, Senior Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, a Guggenheim Fellow, Faculty in the Illinois Informatics Institute, and Affiliate of the Cline Center for Democracy, the CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies, the Computational Science and Engineering Program, and the Program on Law, Behavior, and Social Science, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She also founded and teaches at the Champaign-Urbana Math Circle.
Her research on redistricting has been published in many scholarly fields, including operations research, computer science, high performance computing, political science, and law. Its premise as a standard for adjudicating partisan gerrymandering was the subject of 11 amicus briefs and was presented in oral arguments before the Supreme Court.