Professor Michael Ward Retires

Michael Ward retired as Professor of Political Science at Duke University.  He received a bachelors from Indiana University in 1970, served with the 287th Military Police in the Berlin Brigade from 1970-72, and earned a Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University in 1977.  He soon became the Gordon Scott Fulcher Research Fellow where he worked with Harold Guetzkow from 1977-1979. He then joined the Science Center Berlin, working with Karl Wolfgang Deutsch and others for two years building a global political model. After leaving the Science Center, he was appointed Associate Professor of political science at the University of Colorado in 1981, where he was Director of the Center for International Relations. He later moved to the University of Washington in 1997. He was a founding member of the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, and served on its executive board for a decade. In 2009, he joined the faculty of Duke University, and established wardlab.  Ward Lab is a research lab of graduate and undergraduate students at Duke. It is also a website that creates conflict predictions using Bayesian modeling and network analysis. The lab also runs Predictive Heuristics, one of the foremost blogs on global political forecasting and conflict forecasting. He was surrounded by friends and colleagues at the JB Duke yesterday to celebrate his career.