INSTITUTE FOR POLICY RESEARCH

Sarah Abara
Class: 2025
Major(s): Data Science and Social Policy

• Connecting the two via analyses of NHANES but also through helping connect with faculty around the university and looking at the intersections between data science and social determinants of health.

Divya Bhardwaj
Class: 2025
Major(s): Data Science, Journalism, and Psychology

• Helping with communications for the Buehler Center for Health Policy and Economics, including creating social media posts, newsletters, and articles highlighting faculty members’ research and creating infographics and data visualizations to communicate research highlights.

Nicholas Bruha
Class: 2027 

• Researching health policy.

Jackson Buffonge
Class: 2025
Major(s): Psychology and Cognitive Science

Dr. Jennifer Tackett

• Exploring racial and ethnic differences in leadership aspirations among college students and examining how racial climate, academic motivation, and academic efficacy interact with these aspirations.

Jessie Chen
Class: 2026
Major(s): Political Science and RTVF

• Reanalyzing a prior survey of the 2016 election to develop figures comparing studies from the same period.
• Cleaning and assembling texts of finance laws listed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to conduct computational analyses on measures of delegation and discretion.

Joanna Chi 
Class: 2026
Major(s): Social Policy

• Analyzing large data sets for several projects.

Sahil Desai
Class: 2026
Major(s): Psychology and Biology

• Preparing data, organization, and analysis for youth mental health interventions, specifically identity and mindfulness based programs.

Mathieu Egoavil
Class: 2026

Dr. Brian Libgober

• Analyzing lobbying and financial regulation, and the inner workings of companies, associations, and individuals.
• Building databases about lawyers for future projects.

Jenna Einhorn
Class: 2025 
Major(s): Psychology and Global Health Studies

• Working with the Foundations of Health Research Center research project coordinators and wet-lab manager, assisting with day-to-day study tasks, administrative responsibilities, and/or basic laboratory procedures.
• Exploring how mentoring relationships and access to various coping resources affect the physical and mental health of college-aged mentors and middle school-aged mentees.
• Determining if mentorship programs have the ability to lessen the health disparities present within Chicago's youth population.

Ben Gordon
Class: 2026

• Assisting on multidisciplinary early childhood work such as data cleaning and graph making.

Mollie Guba
Class: 2025
Major(s): Philosophy and Legal Studies

Dr. Kim Yuracko and Dr. Max Schanzenbach 

• Analyzing universities' student handbooks and other policies to evaluate and compare schools' disciplinary systems, commitments to free expression, and regulation of student speech.

Violet Hamlin
Class: 2025
Major(s): Economics and Mathematics

• Compiling audits and balance sheets from the Italian Court of Auditors into a comprehensive dataset to analyze the tradeoffs between efficiency and conformity in the face of decentralized decision-making.

Gabriela Holguin
Class: 2026
Major(s): Political Science

• Investigating intra-group solidarity, particularly how different historically excluded groups empathize with each other by studying public sense-making on the Israel and Palestine issue.

Inaya Hussain
Class: 2026
Major(s): Mathematical Methods in Social Sciences (MMSS) and History

• Compiling a literature review to inform a theoretical framework of the role of media freedom in democratic backsliding.
• Training an AI program to recognize climate misinformation.
• Analyzing social media networks to understand how far-right media penetrates mainstream social media.

Tone Jackson
Class: 2026
Major(s): Social Policy and Art Theory and Practice

Dr. Mesmin Destin

• Working with archives of course material from previous years and interviews conducted with SESP Leadership Institute alumni.
• Conducting review of the relevant literature. 

Emily Jiang
Class: 2025
Major(s): Sociology

Dr. Beth Redbird

Angelo Karadimas
Class: 2027
Major(s): Political Science

• Quantitatively analyzing two-generation (2Gen) education programs that aim to advance the economic mobility of families and child development.

Ben Katz
Class: 2025
Major(s): Sociology and Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences (MMSS)

Dr. Maryann Mason

• Submitting an IRB application and then collecting data from the court system files on FRO petitions.
• Crosswalking the FRO information against firearm deaths in Illinois.

Courtney Kim
Class: 2026
Major(s): Psychology

• Studying how stress affects adolescents' well-being and socio-emotional, cognitive, and academic development.
• Testing different types of interventions to reduce stress levels.

Hajoon Kim
Class: 2026
Major(s): Communication Studies, Sociology

• Using statistical data analysis to research misinformation and its impact on people's beliefs.

Aidan Klinges
Class: 2025
Major(s): Political Science and Theater

Dr. Tabitha Bonilla

• Collecting databases of legislation attacking and protecting Critical Race Theory initiatives across all states.
• Building literature review packets.

Will Krew
Class: 2026
Major(s): Mathematical Methods in Social Sciences (MMSS) and Data Science

Dr. Jim Spillane and Dr. Hannes Schwandt

• Examining efforts to build education systems supported by the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) to help reform and prioritize quality science instruction in elementary schools.

Cassie Lee
Class: 2025
Major(s): Environmental Science and Global Health

• Exploring the health impacts on women and children caused by displacement due to the development of the Thwake Dam in Kenya.

Karis Liu
Class: 2025
Major(s): Biology, Psychology, and Philosophy

• Investigating how unique life experiences, challenges, and triumphs of Black youth influence their academic achievement and health. 

Anita Lo
Class: 2026
Major(s): Biological Sciences and Global Health

• Analyzing blood samples to explore how unique experiences and stressors affect one's health.

Maya Mubayi
Class: 2026
Major(s): Mathematics and Statistics

Dr. Larry Hedges

• Surveying researchers to collect data on the criteria for a social scientific study in STEM education to be considered a replication of an original study.

Abhi Nimmagadda
Class: 2025
Major(s): Asian American Studies and Comparative Literature

Kayla Park
Class: 2026
Major(s): Neuroscience and Psychology

• Exploring how daily life experiences and challenges shape the lives of disadvantaged African American youth and affect their physical health.

• Collecting data from 45 day simulated space missions hosted in the Johnson Space Center via NASA's Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA).
• Analyzing how personality traits impact teamwork and performance of groups in extreme isolation and confinement.

Emma Relyea
Class: 2027
Major(s): Social Policy and Political Science

• Examining how school districts achieve continuity and alignment within pre-K through 3rd grade mathematics instruction.
• Analyzing data associated with how multilingual learners are taught mathematics and how school leaders elicit successful strategies within their schools.

Giuliana Rodrigues
Class: 2027
Major(s): Statistics

Dr. Noshir Contractor

• Expanding upon previous work by taking into account potential confounding variables such as patent application topic using Natural Language Processing (NLP), inventor demographic attributes using onomastic analyses, and higher-order network structural effects using social network analysis principles.

Haoyan Shi
Class: 2025
Major(s): Mathematics and Computer Science

• The effect of the SEC's short-sale experiment.
• Physician-Patient concordance on treatment outcomes.
• Preparing for the workshop on research design for causal inference.

Jasmine Sun
Class: 2026
Major(s): Economics and Data Science

• Researching the impact of Chicago's Universal Pre-Kindergarten roll-out on various stakeholders, including teachers, family care providers, parents and students.

Caitlin Smith
Class: 2025
Major(s): Biology and Global Health

• Analyzing dried blood spot samples of newborn babies for adducts commonly found in smokers and biomarkers for chronic disease using liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry.
• Assessing the extent of human exposure to heavy metals from a collection of old library books that were made with heavy metal inks using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry.

Janice Yoo
Class: 2026
Major(s): Political Science

• Evaluating the effectiveness of predictive analytics in identifying the social needs of veterans compared to clients who enter the network through other means.
• Identifying which combination of services improves the social needs scores of veterans identified through predictive analytics.

Stacy Yoon
Class: 2026
Major(s): Biological Sciences

• Helping with user testing and data collection for a toolkit that educates people with diabetes on how to implement treatments.