MIT’s Naoki Egami Sharpens Social Science Methods, Flags AI Errors in Research
Updated
Updated · MIT News · Sep 16
MIT’s Naoki Egami Sharpens Social Science Methods, Flags AI Errors in Research
1 articles · Updated · MIT News · Sep 16
Summary
Naoki Egami, an MIT associate professor with tenure since 2025, focuses on improving how social scientists test whether findings hold beyond the original study setting.
His work on external validity examines how context can skew results—for example, campaign experiments often occur in safe races, even though researchers care most about competitive districts.
Egami also studies AI use in research, developing methods to detect and account for errors when tools generate data at scale, aiming to preserve accuracy and replicability.
That methodological range has brought recognition, including the Society for Political Methodology’s 2025 Emerging Scholar Award and APSA best paper honors in 2019, 2022, 2024 and 2025.
After earning a Princeton PhD in 2020 and moving from Columbia to MIT in 2025, Egami says the institute’s engineering mindset supports his push to solve empirical problems systematically.