CISS Announces ’23 Faculty and Graduate Student Small Grant Recipients
In April 2023, the Center for Innovation in Social Science invited proposals for mini-grants intended to help foster new research or enhance in-progress projects among faculty, full-time lecturers, and graduate students. The Center received more than three times as many high-quality proposals as they could fund. They awarded grants to 16 graduate students and six faculty members working across a range of academic disciplines. Grants are awarded in four categories: travel; training; undergraduate research assistance; and research consultancies.
Grant Recipients
Catherine (Cat) Abou-Khalil (she/her) is a Political Science Ph.D. candidate and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality graduate certificate recipient at BU. Cat’s work broadly focuses and intersects with international human rights, forced migration, and gender and security. Cat’s approach to her research is interdisciplinary and intersectional, centering identity and various methodological approaches, such media analyses, to understand people’s experiences in vulnerable situations.
Cat was awarded a mini travel and conference grant which will support her travel to present at the American Political Science Association (APSA) 2023 Annual Conference to present her co-authored work titled, “Can Pandora’s Box Be Closed? Information Access in Post-Coup Myanmar.” This paper analyzes interviews with people from Myanmar before and after the military coup to assess how they access and identify trustworthy sources during a time of political tension and changing mediascape as the military has blocked access to Facebook, a tool that has been used to share information about the military’s repression and mobilize protests.
Zoe Albert (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in the Anthropology department studying the gut microbiome of wild Bornean orangutans. She is especially interested in conservation of wild species, animal health and welfare, and communicating science to a wide array of people.
Zoe will utilize her CISS funds to attend Genomics in the Jungle, a course taught by expert primate geneticists in the Peruvian Amazon. This will serve to enhance her methodological skills prior to her doctoral dissertation research entitled: Environment, energetics and diet as modulators of the gut microbiome of Bornean Orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) Living in Gunung Palung National Park, West Kalimantan, Indonesia.
Martin Aucoin (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology with a focus on food, economics, transnational supply chains and migration. He is currently conducting dissertation fieldwork in The Gambia and the United States on the exporting of American poultry products to West Africa.
Martin’s CISS Mini-Grant makes possible a one-month research trip to Atlanta, GA to conduct key-informant interviews with one of the world’s largest poultry exporting companies.
Ana Barun (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in the Anthropology department. Barun engages with diverse datasets including Pleistocene landscapes and cultural materials, to advance our understanding of the peopling of the eastern Adriatic coast during a critical period of transition that saw the spread of the earliest members of our species into Southeastern Europe. She is interested in measuring regional landscape variability expressed in the archaeological record through lithic raw material selection and procurement in order to draw conclusions to what specific sites were used for, if materials were being traded, and how prehistoric humans moved and settled in places in proximity to raw material sources. Check out her profile on the Anthropology website here.
Ana will use Center funding to continue conducting research through excavating the Neandertal archaeological site of Crvena Stijena, Montenegro to study lithic variability in this coastal area of the Balkans. Artifacts from here will allow the comparison of lithic assemblages from other Balkan sites to place undated and unexcavated sites into a proper sequence for regional analysis of chronological and cultural change, which is directly related to settlement patterns.
Florian David Bodamer (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science. Florian’s main research interests are located at the intersection of political economy and security in defense industries and how defense industries influence states’ power in the international system. Taking a comparative political economy approach, Florian studies state interactions with business and industry interest groups, variation in industrial policies, arms exports, defense industry globalization, and domestic procurement patterns and defense spending.
Olivia Britton (she/her) is a Political Science Ph.D. candidate at Boston University. Her research investigates the political, social, and economic webs that shape refugee integration experiences on the ground.
Through her CISS grant, Olivia will further develop her dissertation by conducting a discourse analysis on politicians’ language about integration in mainstream media. Ashley Carhee, an International Relations and Sociology double major, will serve as her research assistant.
Japonica Brown-Saracino (she/her) is Professor of Sociology and WGS and Chair of Sociology. She studies gentrification, sexualities, gender and place, culture, and housing.
Charles B. Chang (he/him) is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Boston University (BU), where he directs the Phonetics, Acquisition & Multilingualism Lab PAMLab. His research examines speech perception and production, language learning, bilingualism, and language attrition.
Professor Chang was awarded CISS funding to support his project in collaboration with investigators at Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf (Germany) and University College London (UK). The Alcohol Intoxication Effects on Language (“AlcoLang”) project is examining the effects of alcohol intoxication, a common experience across cultures, on speech production by bilingual language users.
Léa Tân Combette (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences where she works with the Child Cognition Lab. Her research explores how individuals categorize and explain human behavior and traits, such as intelligence and personality, and examines how these beliefs impact their learning outcomes and interactions with the world.With CISS funding, Léa aims to finalize data coding for the Child Cognition Lab, which developed a scientific curriculum to teach natural selection to 3rd graders and gathered quantitative data through questionnaires and qualitative data through classroom videos and teacher-student recordings to evaluate its impact, as well as investigate potential differences among teachers that could affect the program’s efficacy, such as variations in teachers’ mindsets.
Megan J. Elias (she/her) is Director of the Gastronomy Program and Associate Professor of the Practice. Elias is the author of five books and several articles and chapters in edited collections about the histories of food and hospitality, mainly in the U.S.
Professor Elias is writing a biography of the hotelier Conrad Hilton, who assembled the first international hotel chain in the twentieth century. She will be conducting research in the papers of Jane Bourne, who was Hilton’s executive assistant during the first years of his success in building a national hotel chain. Bourne’s papers will also allow her to expand my research into the roles of women in the industry, where they were often, but not always, limited to either support staff or the Housekeeping department.
Randall Ellis (he/him) is a Professor of Economics and a CISS faculty affiliate. His research focuses on health economics, spanning both US and international economics topics, and including the economics of health in developing countries. Dr. Ellis is Past President of the American Society of Health Economists and an associate editor of the Journal of Health Economics and American Journal of Health Economics.
Professor Ellis’ summer grant will support an undergraduate research assistant who will work on Dr. Ellis’s larger research project focused on the underrepresentation of women and racial and ethnic minorities in the academic field of economics. This work will help Dr. Ellis to develop a a major grant proposal focused on reducing sexism, racism, and nationality biases in the US university economics departments
Bo Feng (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Science department. His research specializes in comparative politics with a regional focus on China, where he studies policy-making within a multi-tasking hierarchical bureaucracy. Beyond this main research agenda, he is also interested in selection of civil servants in the Chinese bureaucracy.
Bo’s current research project examines how subnational leaders in China distribute discretionary power among subordinates at lower administrative levels, considering the leader’s policy preferences, subordinates’ individual characteristics and patronage relations, and conflicting policy goals. The research aims to shed light on the strategic allocation of power in a hierarchical organization and its impacts on governance outcomes. He will use Center funding to hire a research assistant.
Joseph Harris (he/him) is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Global Health Politics Workshop at Boston University. He is the author of Achieving Access: Professional Movements and the Politics of Health Universalism (Cornell University Press, 2017) and currently serves as Deputy Editor of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.
Professor Harris’ CISS summer mini-grant will support participation at the European International Studies Association conference in Potsdam, Germany in September 2023. Professor Harris will present and obtain feedback on a paper that explores how neoliberal norms in health at the international level were gradually made to accommodate principles of universalism in the 1990s and 2000s, culminating in the institutionalization of Universal Coverage in the Sustainable Development Goals that guide global development efforts through 2030.
Mehmet Hecan (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate at the department of Political Science. He has been doing his dissertational research on comparative energy transition policies in Europe. His research interests include comparative political economy, industrial policy, green politics, democratization in the Middle East and multi-method methodology.
Jessica Hlay (she/her) is a 5th year Ph.D. candidate in Biological Anthropology and plans to graduate in the spring of 2024. She is currently conducting fieldwork in Utila, Honduras, studying on children’s health and development.
Gizem Kaftan (she/her) is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Political Science. She received her bachelor’s degree in international relations and sociology (double major) from Koc University, Turkey, and her master’s in international affairs from Northeastern University, MA.
Gizem’s research focuses on European Union, nationalism, populism, women’s and LGBT+ rights, and their relationship with the rule of law. In her conference paper, she argues that taxing or financially punishing an illiberal European Union member-state is more effective because these illiberal regimes, generally found in Central and Eastern Europe, depend more on European Union funding. Her research shows that, especially on topics related to minority rights, taxing illiberal countries is more effective than shaming them and can create behavioral change. She plans to present her conference paper at American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Meeting in 2023 in Los Angeles with the support of the CISS mini-grant.
Soe Young Lee (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in the Applied Human Development program at BU Wheelock College of Education and Human Development. Her research interests lie in positive youth development, critical consciousness, teaching and parenting practices, and ethnic-racial identity development. Following her passion to empower youths in minority populations, she hopes to identify ways to foster resilience and purpose in young people and help them develop agency and a voice in their community.
Nayeon Lim (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in Economics at Boston University. Her fields of interest are labor economics, public economics, and policy evaluation.
Jessica Martin (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in the Anthropology department. Jessica’s main research interests include primate ecology and evolution, nutrition, and genetics/genomics. Her dissertation work will focus on how the environment shapes host-associated microbial communities in vervet monkeys. She is particularly interested in how the response of the gut microbiome to external factors such as diet might contribute to host health.
Jessica will use the Center awarded funds to conduct preliminary research and fecal analysis of wild vervet monkeys living in two locations in South Africa with fundamentally different diets. One location has natural foraging, while the other facilitates agricultural and human food foraging. She hopes that this information will provide greater insight into the health and well-being of primate populations.
Zachary Mondesire (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies. His research focuses on the intersection of race, gender, and religion in Africa as well as the institutional legacy of Pan-Africanism. His teaching addresses global ideas about social, economic, and political justice. Professor Mondesire is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on how transnational geopolitics become elements of everyday life.
Marco Olivari (he/him) is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Economics department. Marco’s research interests include Macro-Finance and Time-Series Econometrics.
Marco will use the CISS Summer mini-grant to attend the 2023 Stanford Big-Data Initiative in International Macro-Finance at Stanford GSB in August 2023.
Juan Ortner (he/him) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Economics at Boston University, with research interests in microeconomic theory and industrial organization. His most recent research focuses on developing statistical screens to detect non-competitive behavior in markets, and on designing mechanisms that limit the effects of collusion. He is currently a member of the editorial board at the American Economic Review. He received his PhD in Economics from Princeton University.
Professor Ortner received funding to support his the project entitled “Mediated Collusion” (jointly with Takuo Sugaya from Stanford and Alexander Wolitzky from MIT) which studies how cartels behave when they have access to an intermediary. The project, motivated by the fact that cartels and bidding rings are often facilitated by intermediaries, clarifies how intermediaries can facilitate bidder collusion, and how auctioneers can limit this collusion by restricting the information that they make available after each auction.
Maxwell Palmer (he/him) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Boston University, a Civic Tech Fellow in the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences, and a Faculty Fellow at the Initiative on Cities. He studies American political institutions, including Congress, electoral institutions, and local political institutions, with a focus on how institutional arrangements and rules impact representation and policy outcomes. He is the author of Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America’s Housing Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
Danielle Rousseau Ph. D., LMHC, RYT-500 (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Metropolitan College, licensed therapist, and certified yoga teacher. Her research, teaching, and practice focus on justice, trauma, gender, mental health, mindfulness, inclusivity, and resilience. She is an advocate of holistic strength-based approaches to wellbeing and community care.
So much of our attention in prevention work with urban youth is focused on risk, but what if we also focused on the strengths of our youth and of the urban communities in which they live? Professor Rousseau will use her award to develop an understanding of the resilience of the youth in cities that will translate to informed, strength-based approaches to prevention, intervention, and holistic wellbeing.
Caterina Scaramelli (she/her) is an anthropologist focusing on how people experience environmental transformations and how they come to care for and contest environmental conservation projects. She holds a PhD from MIT’s History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society and MIT, and is currently a Research Assistant Professor in Earth & Environment and Anthropology at BU.
Professor Scaramelli will use the awarded CISS mini-grant to support ongoing fieldwork on Turkish agro-biodiversity through an investigation of seed saving practices.
Samatha Vee (she/her) is Ph.D. student in Biological Anthropology. Her research interests include primate behavioral ecology, physiology, reproduction, and conservation. She is interested in applying novel methods to understand how anthropogenic disturbance affects the health and physiology of wild Bornean orangutans.
Samantha will use Center funding to travel to Gunung Palung National Park, Indonesia, where she will characterize immune function across different age-sex classes of orangutans in an undisturbed forest. Her future research will expand upon this study by comparing how immune function may differ for orangutans using degraded habitats.
Leping Wang (she/her) is currently a third-year Ph.D. student from the Department of Sociology. She holds a Master of Arts in Applied Quantitative Research from New York University and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from Xiamen University in China. She is interested in leveraging statistical modeling and mixed methods to explore empirical problems regarding social inequality and stratification in education, race and ethnicity, and health contexts, and to examine how the intersectionality of race and gender shapes the process and outcome of inequality.
Leping will be using her CISS grant to travel to the American Sociological Association’s Annual Meeting and The Society for the Study of Social Problems’ Annual Meeting this August in Philadelphia. She will be presenting her co-authored work titled “Authors of their Own Adversity: Dutch and American Non-Racists, Racists, Ambivalent Racists, and Inequality Beliefs” at ASA, which examines the demographic profiles of cultural and blatant racists, non-racists, and ambivalent racists, and how racial beliefs maps onto beliefs about inequality; her single-authored work titled “Unpacking Merit, Fit, and Diversity: A Multi-faceted Framework to Academic Gatekeeping” at SSSP, which examines how merit, fit and diversity are evaluated jointly in junior faculty search and how inequality is produced; and serving as the presider for the Social Networks regular session at ASA.
Xuyi Zhao (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology broadly interested in gender, (im)mobility, temporality, and placemaking. Her current research investigates the making of a brand-new urban area in Southwest China and various local efforts of community building. Xuyi’s doctoral dissertation seeks to provide an in-depth analysis of state-individual relations amidst China’s unprecedented urbanization, as well as a careful examination of the myriad ways in which people inhabit, interpret, and envision the city vis-à-vis official timelines of urban development.