Nick Hagar
Postdoctoral Scholar at Northwestern University
Greater Chicago Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNick Hagar is a computational social scientist and data scientist with nine years of experience studying collective attention across journalism and large social platforms, currently a postdoctoral scholar at Northwestern on the Generative AI in the Newsroom Initiative. He blends rigorous academic research (PhD, Computational Journalism Lab) with production experience at The New York Times, Meta, and Patreon, building reproducible, performant pipelines that deploy machine learning, LLMs, and simulation studies. His work spans network analysis, NLP, time-series and sequence modeling, and he has a track record of optimizing mission-critical systems (e.g., cutting compute and runtime for misinformation pipelines). Equally comfortable in Python, R, and SQL, he ties analyses together with robust engineering practices—class-based modules or pipeline tools like drake—and has worked across SQL and NoSQL stores. Nick’s first love is journalism, which informs his practical focus on how information spreads and what drives creator and audience behavior across platforms from TikTok to Substack.
9 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Communication and Media Studies, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Communication and Media Studies at Northwestern University
English
Stackoverflow
101reputation
4kreached
8answers
1question
Github Skills (30)
jekyll8
markdown8
liquid7
ruby7
static-site7
scrapy6
csv6
pycharm6
data-entry6
python-twitter6
site-generator6
google-chrome-extension6
pyspark6
python6
numpy6
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
NHagar/archive_check
May 2021 - Nov 2022
Contributions:116 commits, 34 pushes, 2 branches in 1 year 6 months
NHagar/substack_api
May 2023 - Mar 2025
Contributions:6 releases, 6 PRs, 35 pushes in 1 year 10 months
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