Past Grantees and Fellows

Through triangulating in-depth interviews, original datasets, and national archive data on child placement outcomes, this comprehensive analysis will explore the question, are children harmed when child placement agencies close their doors rather than follow anti-discrimination rules that violate their religious beliefs? 

Insurance is a key tool for disaster recovery. Current research poorly explains how homeowners address complicated uncertainties and inequities in purchasing and using insurance. We will assess available insurance policy and claims datasets and examine homeowners’ experiences to better understand insurance decisions and their uneven impacts.

This project evaluates the effectiveness of School-Based Health Centers (SBHCs) to address health disparities among underserved rural youth using de-identified individual-level panel data on patient visits to healthcare providers. The study focuses on 4 high-poverty rural counties in New York, comparing healthcare for children in 16 school districts with SBHCs to those in 22 school districts without. We will assess how SBHCs help poor rural communities by bringing health services directly to children to enhance rural community health.

The Global Forum for Financial Consumers (GFFC) is an annual conference organized by the International Academy of Financial Consumers (IAFICO). The GFFC aims to provide an opportunity for international academics, policymakers, and professionals to share knowledge, experiences, and practical solutions for financial consumer protection. 2024 marks the 11th year of the conference and the first time it is being held in the US.

We intend to build a digital corpus of French-language documents related to indigeneity in the 19th century, and use both computational methods (NLP/CL) and interpretive tools to understand the ideological biases associated with textual representations of “indigeneity”, from its colonial genesis to its post-colonial recuperation.

Under what conditions do insurgents challenge local gender norms during conflict? Examining armed groups in South Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia and the Sahel, I suggest rebels challenge gender norms to undermine rival elites and empower marginalized sub-sections of the population, reducing the likelihood of population-wide resistance.

This project supports focus groups, participatory mapping, and transcription and translation of open-ended survey responses. All of this effort will help understand the relationship between flood exposure and trust in political institutions.

We evaluate how the choice of policy in ranking college applications affects different sociodemographic groups. Training on four years of application and decision data, we compare ML algorithms with different features removed (e.g., race/ethnicity, major preference) to understand how this changes the applicant ranking.

Where do ideas of private property come from? This project will examine how territorial instincts might generate property norms through biases in cultural learning. The project will also investigate how people think about property norms, e.g., whether they are fundamentally moral or conventional.

The talks given at this conference affected a publication co-authored by Tolbert in 2012 and also laid the foundation for a 2014 conference that resulted in the special issue of ILR Review. Based on peer reviews, nine papers from the conference were published in a 2016 special issue of the ILR Review, Inequality in the Workplace. Collectively, the papers have received over 300 citations to date.

Infant mammals produce reflexive distress vocalizations and later produce social vocalizations in response to social partners. We will characterize the emergence of social vocalizations in wild-type and autism spectrum disorder model mice, which will help identify brain mechanisms that underlie the emergence of social communication.

This project engages conflict-driven migrants on the Thai-Myanmar border in using participatory photography and storytelling to counter-map their experiences and alternative futures amid forced migration and state violence.

This research project combines agent-based modeling and scenario planning to engage stakeholders in examining reinvestment choices along a spectrum of building reuse to demolition, taking into account larger non-profit and public entities that play an outsized role related to innovation along this spectrum.

Varanasi conducted mixed-methods research to explore low-income teachers’ inhibitions around seeking digital social support. He is conducting virtual interviews with teachers, higher management, and non-profit personnel, to gain insights into the challenges that low-income teachers are facing to seek digital support practices during pandemic. The funding is helping him to recruit 55 participants. The study will be making an important contribution towards inequity issues that impact women teachers’ overall job security and their daily work practices.

AI-driven diagnostic applications are increasingly deployed to support low-skilled community health workers (CHWs) in hard-to-reach communities. This work aims to examine how CHWs in rural settings engage with AI explanations and what they need to know to safely operate such systems in high-stakes healthcare contexts.

This study, co-directed by Stephen Vider (Cornell University) and David S. Byers (Bryn Mawr College), investigates the role of grassroots clinical activism in the depathologization of LGBTQ people in the United States from 1960 to 1987, through archival research as well as oral history interviews.

On Our Own traces the impact of deinstitutionalization—the release of people with mental illnesses and disabilities from state-run institutions—to reveal how efforts to repair state systems of mental healthcare were reshaped by the convergence of patient activism and privatization after World War II.