Simparlia
Simulating parliamentarian voting behaviour using digital AI personas of MPs.
Edward Anders
Data Science PhD at the University of Oxford researching the political impacts of AI and building the infrastructure for synthetic agents. Previously led operations at early-stage startups.
About
Edward is a DPhil candidate in Social Data Science at the Oxford Internet Institute, building synthetic electorates to predict political behaviour.
Education
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DPhil Social Data Science — Jesus College, Oxford
2026–
Shirley Scholar
Oxford Internet Institute. Using synthetic agent-based models of the UK electorate to predict political behaviour under different treatments.
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MPhil Politics — St Antony's College, Oxford
2024–2026
Dahrendorf Scholar
Papers on advanced experimental, quantitative, and computational social science. Thesis investigated whether labelling AI-generated political content mitigates or deepens affective polarisation using survey experiments funded by YouGov.
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BSc Economics and Politics — University of Bristol
2018–2021
Paper on the effects of the 2019 General Election campaigns on vote switching. Head of School's Commendation for the Dissertation and Final-Year Performance.
Experience
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Graduate Researcher — Nuffield College, Oxford
2025–
Assisting Professor Rachel Bernhard on her Appearance-Based Politics book project. Built PDF scraping and data-extraction pipelines in Python and built reproducible analysis scripts in R.
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Research Analyst — Oxford Levant Advisory
2025–
Building data solutions for a geopolitical risk consultancy. Developed a pipeline of live news and social media data on the Middle East building an open-source media map.
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Strategy Research Manager — Complyance
2024–2025
Employee #10 at a seed-stage AI GRC startup. Backed by Creandum. Established a post-sales department with the CSO and CEO. Led cybersecurity research across the EU AI Act, SOC2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPPA for clients to define how forward-deployed engineering teams can deploy AI compliance agents.
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Senior Founder's Associate — Compose
2021–2024
Employee #1 at a Creandum-backed seed-stage startup building an all-in-one inbox management tool. Led operations and GTM as well as building the data infrastructure and analytics for user behaviour and growth. Hired and managed the first 5 employees across engineering, product, and growth functions.
Research
Edward's PhD is at the intersection of AI and computational social science, investigating the political and societal impacts of AI through large-scale experiments and synthetic agent-based models.
Publications
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MPhil Thesis: AI Labels and Affective Polarisation
Working paper · 2026
Understanding the effects of AI labels as a treatment to mitigate downstream effects of the effects of AI-generated content on trust and emotional-based affective polarisation. Developed a new formal model of the interaction between AI labels, trust, and emotions and tested experimentally with two survey experiments fielded by YouGov.
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Talking To Machines: Synthetic Replication Games — Duch, Batistoni et al.
Forthcoming
PNAS / Nature Computational Science (in preparation)
Co-author on a paper from the Talking to Machines project at Nuffield College, Oxford — a platform to facilitate the design, conduct, and analysis of large-scale experimental trials using LLM-powered agents.
Grants & awards
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Oxford CESS Research Grant
2025
£1,500 from the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences.
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Norman Chester Fund Research Grant
2025
£1,000 awarded for thesis research.
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YouGov UniOM Survey Experiment Grant
2024 & 2025
Awarded twice, ~£1,000 each, to field two nationally representative UK survey experiments.
Projects
SABC
Web app for St Antony's College, Oxford's boat club signups.
