Philip Leifeld is professor in Social Statistics at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on political networks, both from a substantive and methodological perspective. He is the author of several software packages, including Discourse Network Analyzer (DNA), texreg, and btergm. His work has appeared in disciplinary journals like the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and the British Journal of Political Science, and in interdisciplinary outlets such as the Journal of Statistical Software, Nature Climate Change, and Physica A: Statistical Mechanics.