Guggenheim fellow Robb Willer featured in Stanford Daily

In an interview with the Stanford Daily, Robb Willer said he plans to spend his Guggenheim fellowship year working on longer-form research about political coalition formation — how groups come to recognize shared interests, build alliances across differences, and keep collective efforts over time.

He’s especially interested in coalition challenges that arise within ideological camps. On the American left, for example, groups often agree on the goal of social change but disagree on strategy, priorities, and where to draw coalition lines. Willer sees those tensions as tied up with questions of identity, morality, collective action, and political institutions.

The article also noted Willer's recently published piece in Nature where he argues that the social sciences need to keep strengthening research practices— like transparency, replication, preregistration, open data, and close attention to statistical power. For him, the stakes make rigor non-negotiable: when research has real social consequences, it needs to be especially careful.

The interview concludes with his advice for students: ask big, ambitious questions, but pair them with disciplined research designs and take both methods and real-world institutions seriously.

Willer is a professor of Sociology and the director of the Politics and Social Change Lab, the AI for Public Benefit Lab, and the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. 

Willer is one of five Stanford winners of the 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship, alongside economics professor Ran Abramitzky, history professor Joel Cabrita, anthropology professor Angela Garcia and anesthesiology professor Sheng Xu.