Isaac Mehlhaff is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and is also affiliated with the Data Science Institute, Committee on Data Science, and Program in Political Economy at the University of Chicago. 

His research is driven by substantive questions in public opinion and political psychology: How and why do citizens change their attitudes on political issues? Under what conditions can political discussion exacerbate or ameliorate mass polarization? How is polarization causally related to other features of government and society? He approaches his work primarily as a computational social scientist, using and developing methods in natural language processing, machine learning, and Bayesian modeling.

He received his PhD in 2023 from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also holds an MA from UNC-Chapel Hill and a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.