Chris Kromphardt: Delivering Humanity to a Data-Driven World
Published August 27, 2025
Let’s gain a little insight into Chris Kromphardt, a political scientist and Assistant Director of the Johns Hopkins University MS in Data Analytics and Policy program. If you’ve watched the Academy-award nominated film, Moneyball, the true story of a low-budget baseball team that incorporates sabermetrics to find and recruit undervalued players to compete with wealthier teams, you’ll uncover much of what consumes his days.
An avid reader, movie buff, diehard baseball fan (Go Cubs!), and data enthusiast, Kromphardt relates to the film on many levels. If he ages half as well as Brad Pitt, the lead actor in Moneyball, he is okay with that too!
The idea of leveling the playing field has been a driving force in Kromphardt’s professional journey. After earning a political science degree, with a minor in philosophy, at Eastern Illinois University, Kromphardt, a self-described “former future law student,” enrolled at the University of Alabama, leaving with a PhD in political science and a love of teaching. “Though I had always been interested in the law, I found I could look at a lot of the same questions that interested me, just from a political science perspective,” he said.
Many of Kromphardt’s questions centered around his interest in the federal judiciary, and particularly the Supreme Court, a “pretty opaque and powerful institution.”
“I have always been interested in how we can get points of leverage to gain an understanding of what the Supreme Court is doing,” he said. “This led me to the subject of my dissertation and looking at the dynamics between law clerks, who are hand-picked in their 20s and 30s by Supreme Court Justices whom they serve as 60-, 70-, and 80-year olds. In fact, six of the current nine Justices were themselves law clerks and held these elite positions that allowed them to assist former Justices with legal research, case preparation, and drafting opinions. It is inherently intriguing. A lot of people don’t know a lot about this highly selective, exceptionally competitive process, the mentor-mentee relationships that result, and how this institution operates.”
In addition to his research, Kromphardt has a true passion for teaching and has taught courses on public policy, research methods, research design, constitutional law, and American politics, including shorts stints at Cornell College, a small liberal arts school, and the much larger Washington State University. Prior to his arrival at Johns Hopkins in July 2024, he also worked at the University of Iowa where he designed online courses in research methods and helped bring those courses to Kosovo.
“My position at Hopkins allows me to continue to apply and develop online education as well as to stay at the forefront of public policy,” he said. “It is interesting to work with students who are working, or aspire to work, in influential positions shaping public policy. I have found that my training as a political scientist really serves me well in this position, particularly because it communicates well with public policy-adjacent and relevant disciplines. It combines the opportunity to direct really impactful online education and also to teach courses that are methodologically and substantively really interesting to me. I have learned so much from Program Director Collin Paschall, a fellow political scientist and Midwesterner, and I am constantly blown away by the professional experiences that our adjunct faculty bring to their classrooms. I am also impressed with the high caliber of students at Hopkins. This position has been a great opportunity for me to learn from colleagues who are on the cutting edge of their disciplines, as well as from my students.”
It was the connections that Kromphardt forged with his own professors, including early mentors from diverse fields like literature and biology, which convinced him that he would find his home in academia. He is well-suited to thrive in the ever-evolving field of data analytics by teaching students not only the basics – downloading data, inputting it into a program like R or Python and running basic analyses- but also to introducing more advanced courses on quantitative methods, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
“Data suffuse everything, whether we want them to or not,” Kromphardt said. “Some of the fundamental things about our program include learning about the extent to which data are pervasive in society and then learning how to craft interesting questions and design research so you can answer those questions. Additionally, learning to effectively communicate the answers to those questions to a wide variety of stakeholders and people is essential.
“From the perspective of public policy, the question is how can we use data – which are about people, communities, and institutions – to better understand those entities and to see how they respond to efforts to improve their lives and those outcomes,” he continued. “People are very complex, which makes them interesting to study, but it means that we have to have humility about what we are learning from the analysis. I think there are a lot of people who want to use data wisely and who are interested in using public policy to create change. I grew up in a blue state and went to school in a red state, but one of the things I have always appreciated was the common language of data analytics. How to run a good regression is not a Republican or Democrat question. Data analytics has always been a way for me to connect with people who might be very different from me. We can talk about the research, and the research can keep us out of the shirts and skins of modern politics. I think we can make the world a better place by having people who, yes, have technical skills, but also have an awareness of how to use them to make their communities better. If you are one of those people, I would love to work with you.”