Charles Crabtree

Charles Crabtree is a political scientist studying class-based discrimination who left Dartmouth College to join Monash University near Melbourne, Australia, part of a cohort of more than a dozen researchers the university has recruited from American institutions including Harvard Medical School, MIT, Cornell, and UC Berkeley.

Crabtree grew up in poverty in Colorado, was homeless for a time, and dropped out of high school before being encouraged to attend college through the University of Colorado's continuing education division. "There's all this background noise that prevents you from really focusing on the work that you want to do," Crabtree said of his decision to leave Dartmouth, citing Monash's research investment and freedom from the funding pressures affecting American academia. Despite the opportunities ahead, Crabtree described the move as bittersweet, saying American higher education "saved" him and calling it "infuriating to see such a huge national advantage be destroyed willfully." Monash has invested $10 million so far in its US recruitment effort and expects 15 researchers to relocate in 2026.

Alongside his academic research, Crabtree builds and maintains open-source software for quantitative social science, including several R packages available on CRAN and GitHub, such as plotrr for hierarchical data visualization, nomine for inferring race, ethnicity, and gender from name data, and repllm, a methodology toolkit for using large language models in peer-reviewed text annotation and classification. He has also built interactive research dashboards, including a tool exploring personalism in dictatorships across 123 countries and a searchable database of European protest and state coercion events spanning 1980 to 1995, as well as classroom simulation tools used in his teaching at Monash.