Curriculum Vitae

Lorcan McLaren

PhD Researcher in Quantitative & Computational Social Science

Connected_Politics Lab · UCD School of Politics & International Relations

lorcan.mclaren@ucdconnect.ie | lorcanmclaren.com | GitHub | LinkedIn

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Education

University College Dublin
PhD Quantitative & Computational Social Science
since September 2023
  • Thesis: Taking the Green Pill – Moral Language, Emotion, and Persuasion in the Climate Crisis
  • Advisor: Dr. James P. Cross
University College Dublin
MSc Politics & Data Science
2021 – 2022
  • Thesis: Polarising Rhetoric and Twitter Rage
  • Advisor: Dr. James P. Cross
Trinity College Dublin
BA Computer Science, Linguistics & French
2016 – 2020
  • Thesis: Automatic Gaze Annotation and Conversational Dominance in the MULTISIMO Corpus
  • Advisor: Dr. Carl Vogel

Research Experience

Connected_Politics Lab, University College Dublin
Research Assistant
since November 2024
University College Dublin, with Swiss National Science Foundation
Research Assistant
July 2023 – February 2024
Computational Linguistics Group, Trinity College Dublin
Research Assistant
May – August 2020

Industry Experience

Dataminr
Data Analyst, R&D
2022 – 2023
  • Built ingests to exploit new data sources via APIs and web scraping
  • Developed automated workflows for data extraction, transformation, and quality assurance in consultation with subject matter experts
  • Built, maintained, and updated visualisation dashboards and tools to monitor data health
  • Developed protocols to systematise processes for future work
Editor, Domain Expert
2021 – 2022
  • Monitored streams of potentially newsworthy content from around the globe and alerted clients on breaking news
  • Developed new techniques for discovering breaking news events using social media and other publicly available data
  • Tracked misinformation related to COVID-19 and election integrity across multiple jurisdictions in a variety of languages

Working Papers

McLaren, L., Cross, J.P., Krakowska, Z., Rauner, R. and Schoonvelde, M. (2025) 'Magic Words or Methodical Work? Challenging Conventional Wisdom in LLM-Based Political Text Annotation'.

McLaren, L. (2025) 'When Climate Change Hits Home: Natural Disasters and Climate Rhetoric in the European Parliament'.

McLaren, L. (2024) 'Here and Now or There and Then? The Psychological Distance of Climate Change in Parliamentary Speech'.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

McLaren, L., Koutsombogera, M. and Vogel, C. (2020) 'A Heuristic Method for Automatic Gaze Detection in Constrained Multi-Modal Dialogue Corpora', in 2020 11th IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Infocommunications, pp. 55–60.

McLaren, L., Koutsombogera, M. and Vogel, C. (2020) 'Gaze, Dominance and Dialogue Role in the MULTISIMO Corpus', in 2020 11th IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Infocommunications, pp. 83–88.

Presentations

Conferences & Workshops

2026 EU Climate Politics and Policy Workshop, Dublin; European Consortium for Political Research Joint Sessions of Workshops, Innsbruck; European Political Science Society Conference, Belfast; European Consortium for Political Research General Conference, Krakow
2025 COMPTEXT Conference, Vienna; European Consortium for Political Research Joint Sessions of Workshops, Prague; Una Europa PhD Summer School on Artificial Intelligence and Creativity, Paris; Political Studies Association of Ireland Annual Conference, Galway
2024 COMPTEXT Conference, Amsterdam; Political Studies Association of Ireland Annual Conference, Dublin; SPIRe PhD Workshop, Dublin; Political Studies Association of Ireland Postgraduate Conference, Dublin

Teaching

Spring 2025, 2026 AI and Large Language Models, Postgraduate, Module Instructor
Autumn 2023, 2024 Introduction to EU Politics, Undergraduate, Teaching Assistant
Spring 2024 Research Methods in Political Science, Undergraduate, Teaching Assistant

Scholarships & Grants

Total funding attracted:

2025 – 2027 Government of Ireland Scholarship, Research Ireland €68,000
2025 PEC Travel Funding, Political Studies Association of Ireland €400
2024 – 2025 Climate Fellowship, UCD Earth Institute €1,000
2023 – 2025 SPIRe Research Committee Funding, UCD School of Politics & International Relations €3,000
2023 – 2027 Iseult Honohan Scholarship, UCD School of Politics & International Relations €124,190
2020 Erasmus Mundus Scholarship, European Commission €17,250

Awards

2020 Best Paper Award, IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Infocommunications

Service, Leadership & Professional Development

Service & Leadership

since 2024 Convenor, PSAI Computational Methods Specialist Group
2017 – 2018 Student Convenor, TCD School of Computer Science & Statistics
Deputy Chair, TCD Students' Union Lobby Group
2016 – 2017 Student Convenor, TCD School of Linguistic, Speech & Communication Sciences

Professional Memberships

Political Studies Association of Ireland · American Political Science Association · European Consortium for Political Research · European Political Science Society