Political Science Faculty

Kristin Lunz Trujillo joined the Boston College political science department in 2025. Her research and teaching interests include political behavior, political psychology, political geography, urban-rural division, health politics and policy attitudes, survey methods, experimental methods, trust, and identity. 

One of her in-progress book projects includes an investigation into how place-based socialization, e.g., growing up in a rural area, influences political and social attitudes later in life. A second in-progress book project investigates how the experience of becoming a parent with a child with a disability shapes political behavior through interactions with group associations and local political institutions. Dr. Lunz Trujillo also has ongoing work on rural identity (or a sense of attachment to being a rural person) and the psychology of place, health attitudes, and trust in science and government.

Much of her existing work focuses on the role of rural identity in people’s conceptions of government, including political affiliations, populist sentiment, trust in expertise, immigration stances, and more. This research emphasizes that place can be a socializing factor beyond physical location. In addition, she also has a large body of work on health attitudes and behaviors relating to vaccines, misinformation, trust, and more that has won several awards and has been sponsored by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant.

Dr. Lunz Trujillo’s research has been published in a variety of academic outlets, including Nature Human Behavior, Scientific Data, Political Behavior, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Geography, JAMA Network Open, and more. Her work has been featured in hundreds of news outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report, John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, and more, and has also been used in official guidelines for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 

Prior to joining the faculty at Boston College, Dr. Lunz Trujillo was an assistant professor of political science at the University of South Carolina. Before that, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center and Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute.