Roberts research focuses on better measuring and understanding the political information strategies of authoritarian governments, with a specific focus on studying censorship and propaganda in China. She has also developed widely used methods for automated content analysis in the social sciences. Roberts received her PhD in Government from Harvard University in 2014, an M.S. in Statistics and B.A. in International Relations and Economics from Stanford in 2009. Her work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Political Analysis, Journal of the American Statistical Association and Science.