Lauren Leek is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Science.

More information about Lauren Leek

Lauren Leek is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Science. Her research sits at the intersection of political economy, social data science and computational social science, with a focus on the politics of central banks, the political economy of Europe, and methodological and measurement innovation involving big data and large language models (LLMs). She built CentralBankTalk.eu, a large-scale database of central bank speeches classified using LLMs.

Before joining Leiden in 2026, Lauren was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Reading/the London School of Economics Data Science Institute. She defended her PhD at the European University Institute in Florence end of 2025. During her doctoral studies she was a trainee in the European Central Bank’s DG Economics, where she developed the bank’s first LLM use case. She was also a visiting researcher at the London School of Economics. After her PhD, she was active in the London start-up scene and the UK polling industry.

Her work has been published in the Journal of European Public Policy, the European Journal of Political Economy, and Regional Studies, among others. Alongside her academic work, she writes a data-driven Substack on urban inequality, algorithms, and political economy, and her data journalism has been featured by FT Alphaville, The Guardian, and BBC Radio 4.

You can find her personal website at laurenleek.eu and her Substack at laurenleek.substack.com.

PhD supervision

Lauren Leek is available to supervise PhD students and invites PhD research proposals in the areas of:

• Computational Social Science
• Political Economy of Europe
• The Politics of Central Banking