Sierra Davis Thomander is a Political Science PhD candidate at Stanford University. She earned a BA in Political Science with a minor in Africana Studies from Brigham Young University in 2017 and an MA in Political Science from Stanford University in 2022. Prior to Stanford, she worked from 2018-2020 at Qualtrics. She has two daughters (Matisse & Violet) and has been married to her husband, Zachary, for over a decade.
Her academic work focuses on gender and politics broadly, particularly the political pipeline for women candidates and the institutional factors underlying women’s underrepresentation. She focuses largely on local and state elections and party primaries, with a particular interest in the Republican party. She also researches conservatives’ public opinion on key issues such as mail-in voting. Her other academic interests include increasing external validity in survey experiments and promoting good questionnaire design.
