CISS Announces 2025 Faculty and Graduate Student Summer Mini-Grant Recipients

  • By: Shannon Landis

In April 2025, the Center for Innovation in Social Science invited proposals for summer mini-grants intended to help foster new research or enhance in-progress projects among faculty, full-time lecturers, and graduate students. As always, the Center received more high-quality proposals as they could fund. They awarded grants to 17 graduate students, 7 faculty members, and 1 postdoctoral associate working across a range of academic disciplines. Grants are awarded in four categories: travel; training; undergraduate research assistance; research supplies; and research consultancies. CISS is grateful to CAS, the T. Scott Miyakawa Endowment Fund for the Social Sciences, and the Graduate School for their support of our summer mini-grant program.

Grant Recipients

Hazal Aydın (she/her)  is a Ph.D. student in the Anthropology Department who previously earned her BA from Boğaziçi University and MA from Koç University. Her current research explores migration, affect, and political imagination in contemporary Turkey. Her article on gendered subjectivities in Turkey’s theatre industry won the 2023 Student Paper Prize from the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association, and she is also the co-organizer of the Imagining Turkey Podcast Series.

Hazal’s received a travel small grant to support her work on her project “Decision to Stay: Collective Emotions and Belonging in Istanbul’s ‘Rescued Territories’” investigates how oppositional groups in authoritarian Turkey create alternative forms of belonging through spaces of resistance, examining how political emotions shape decisions to stay rather than migrate.

Ana Barun Coscia (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in the anthropology department. She is an archaeologist who engages with diverse datasets including Pleistocene landscapes and cultural materials, to advance our understanding of the peopling of the eastern Adriatic coast of Croatia 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 on what specific sites were used for, and how prehistoric humans moved and settled in places in proximity to raw material sources.

Ana was awarded an undergraduate research assistance small grant to support the standardization and statistical analysis of lithic assemblage data, both from published sources and newly acquired collections. This synthesis will identify patterns in tool diversity and inter-site relationships, allowing for a broader assessment of technological variability and diachronic change, particularly by contrasting Croatian Middle Palaeolithic Mousterian industries with Upper Palaeolithic blade-based technologies.

Bhavya received an undergraduate research assistance small grant to support her project exploring the social and ecological factors that determine how semi-nomadic pastoralists in Ethiopia organize their settlements. She is exploring the hypothesis that proximity to other groups, and the subsequent threat of intergroup conflict, lead people to form densely clustered villages and enabling easy collective defense. In the broader context, she aims to provide quantitative, empirical proof that settlement patterns within small-scale societies are shaped by the need for consensus-building. For this, she will use a combination of remote sensing and computational modeling methods.

Estelle Brun (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science, where she studies nationalism and political mobilization in Western democracies. Her dissertation analyzes the role of institutional memory in recent voting trends in the United States and France.

Estelle received a travel small grant to support her fieldwork in South Carolina, where she seeks to explore the politicization of the state’s memory through qualitative interviews and visits to war monuments and museums. This fieldwork will inform her dissertation, specifically the first step of her theory-building and the empirical chapter on the South Carolina/United States case study.

Tyler J. Fuller (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate in the graduate program in Religion, where his research focuses on the social scientific study of religion, health-seeking behaviors, and health education and promotion. He uses interpretive qualitative methods, drawing on narrative and discourse analysis to examine how religious and public health actors construct meaning around health and illness. He completed his MTS and MPH through the Religion and Public Health Dual Degree Program at Emory University.

Tyler was awarded an undergraduate research assistance small grant to support his dissertation which explores how Catholics at three Boston churches experienced and responded to COVID-19 prevention efforts, including stay-at-home orders, online worship, and public health guidelines. He uses the concept of “prevention narratives” to examine how these communities told stories about the pandemic to make sense of their experiences and balance religious commitments with health concerns.

Cristina Gago (she/her) is a health disparities researcher committed to supporting healthful nutrition and closing nutrition disparities among low-income families with young children through equity-centered policy and system interventions. As an Assistant Professor of Community Health Sciences and a Fellow with the Evans Center for Implementation and Improvement Sciences, she applies implementation science principles and behavior change theory to the evaluation of community health, food assistance, and social service interventions, such as those offered by the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and Head Start (a federally funded early childhood education program for families with low income).

Professor Gago was awarded an undergraduate research assistance small grant to hire a student to assist in the production of a final report, executive summary, and conference presentation summarizing the results from interviews conducted by the Cumberland County Food Resources Coalition, led by the Public Health Department, is a multi-sector partnership working to address food insecurity through coordinated action, research, and advocacy, to identify barriers in food assistance programs.

Sam Gerstle (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate in political science, where he works on issues related to international relations and political economy. He is particularly interested in the intersection of technology, political economy, and security studies, focusing on how states adapt to new economic and technological challenges. He lives in Watertown, MA with his wife, two-year-old son, and dog.

Sam received an undergraduate research assistance small grant to support his dissertation which examines how countries mobilize their economies during wartime and investigates why their approaches differ. The dissertation assesses the consequences of these choices for international relations.

Neha Gondal (she/her) is an associate professor in the department of sociology and the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences (CDS). She uses mathematical and computational techniques to investigate the relationship between social networks and culture and its role in the production and maintenance of social inequalities. Dr. Gondal draws on a variety of computational techniques in her work including exponential random graph models, machine learning, multi-level regression models, and agent-based simulations. 

Professor Gondal received a travel small grant to help fund the launch of fieldwork for a new project tentatively titled “Elites of Delhi: How Cultural and Social Capital Reproduce Status Distinctions in India’s Capital City”. In the midst of skyrocketing inequality in India, her goal in the project is to study the cultural capital and social networks are implicated in the generation and consolidation of status inequalities in the New Delhi, the capital city of India. 

Sümeyra Güneş (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in sociocultural anthropology. Her dissertation explores how stand-up comedians in Istanbul navigate identity, censorship, and belonging through humor, focusing on the affective and political stakes of performance in times of crisis.
Sümeyra was awarded a travel small grant will support archival research on historical uses of humor in response to trauma, displacement, and political repression. The research will enrich her analysis of how humor operates as emotional endurance, social critique, and cultural memory in contemporary contexts of crisis.

Thang Ha is a Ph.D. (he/him) student in the Department of Political Science with research interests in international relations and international political economy. His work focuses on economic statecraft, particularly the use of covert economic sanctions—measures by which states manipulate commercial ties for political ends while concealing their coercive intent. By challenging the conventional conviction that publicity is always the optimal choice when employing sanctions, his research contributes to broader debates on signaling and economic statecraft. 

Thang received an undergraduate research assistance small grant to support the development of a novel dataset on economic sanctions. This dataset, which incorporates both overt and covert sanction episodes, will be among the first to systematically document hidden coercive practices in economic statecraft. It offers the empirical foundation of his study and aims to shed light on why states choose to obscure their political demands through commercial pressure.

Anne Johnakin (she/her) is a Ph.D. Student of archaeological anthropology in the Anthropology Department. She focuses on anthropological archaeology in the prehistoric Mediterranean and Near East. She uses methods including archaeobotany, bioarchaeology, and ceramic residue analysis to answer questions about cuisine, craft, and gender. This summer, she will be working with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens on the Athenian Agora project to recover and study ancient plant materials.

Anne received a travel small grant to support her joining Dr. John M. Marston’s ongoing archaeobotanical project in the Athenian Agora excavating an undisturbed 15x30m archaeological profile that includes Ottoman industrial structures and Middle Byzantine through Roman era domestic spaces. Once they reach the Classical period, the project hopes to find Archaic (7th to 6th century BCE) houses and below that, Early Iron Age tombs.

Melissa Kibbe (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences and the director of the Developing Minds Lab. Her lab examines the representations and computations underlying developing cognition in infants and young children.
Professor Kibbe’s undergraduate research assistance small grant will support her study investigating the cognitive factors underlying the development of attitudes about body weight in children, and how these cognitive processes intersect with child-, culture-, and community-level factors.

Yasir Kuoti (he/him) is a Ph.D. student in political science, specializing in international relations and comparative politics with a regional focus on the Middle East. His research explores Middle East politics, regime politics, religion and politics, and international security, with work published in such outlets as the Journal of International Affairs, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, War on the Rocks, among others. Prior to his doctoral studies, he held policy and research roles in both the U.S. and Iraq and holds degrees from the University of Baghdad, University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, and Marquette University.

Yasir received a training support small grant to train in critical research methods essential for ensuring the methodological rigor of his research which examines how authoritarian regimes use political rhetoric as a precursor to state repression; how such repression fuels the emergence of armed groups; and why some of these armed groups transition to politics while others do not.

Loretta Lees (she/her) is Director of the Initiative on Cities and a Professor of Sociology. She is an international expert on gentrification and its various mutations in cities over time. She is an urban geographer and urbanist who is internationally known for her research on gentrification, urban regeneration, global urbanism, urban policy, urban public space, architecture, and urban social theory. 

Professor Lees was awarded an an undergraduate research assistance small grant to hire a student to support her project focused on the process of gentrification affects schools, which can lead to declining enrollments; at the same time schools themselves can become actors promoting and consuming gentrification. Her project studies both scenarios in East Boston.

John M. Marston (he/him) is a Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology. He is an environmental archaeologist who studies the long-term sustainability of agriculture and land use in semi-arid regions of western and central Asia. His current research focuses on reconstructing the spatial extent of agropastoral systems that supported urban populations in the eastern Mediterranean, and how those varied across imperial regimes of the last 4000 years.
Professor Marston received a travel small grant to visit Athens, Greece to take part in archaeological excavation at the Ancient Agora of Athens, the political and economic center of the ancient city. In Athens, Marston will lead efforts to recover plant and animal remains from Middle and Early Byzantine period houses, in order to study domestic foodways and agricultural economies of this poorly studied period of Greek history.
Jessica Martin (she/her) is a third-year Ph.D. student in anthropology, specializing in biological anthropology. She is currently investigating the gut microbiome, gastrointestinal health, and dietary variation of wild vervet monkeys across three ecologically distinct study sites in South Africa.
Jess’s research supplies small grant will support gut microbial collection and analysis using Oxford Nanopore 16S rRNA sequencing and shotgun metagenomics. These data, alongside measures of gut inflammation and parasitic infection, will be integrated with behavioral observations to assess how anthropogenic diets influence vervet monkey health. Her work also contributes to local training and community engagement through hands-on instruction in field and lab techniques for university students, as well as the development of interactive microbiome-focused lessons for schoolchildren near the study sites.

Julia McClellan (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences investigating cognitive development in the Developing Minds Lab (Dr. Melissa Kibbe) and is originally from San Francisco, CA. She is interested in the format and algorithms that characterize the way in which we humans think, and is researching this both in the visual and compositional domain. 

Julia was awarded an undergraduate research assistance small grant to support her work using development as a tool to investigate cognition — the maturational processes and experiences needed to bring about cognitive development.

Syeda Rumana Mehdi (she/her) is a second year Ph.D. student in the anthropology department. Her research examines how Pakistani Shia women experience time, agency and futurity during pilgrimage to Karbala, Iraq.
Rumana was awarded a travel small grant to embark on the 15 day Arbaeen pilgrimage to Iraq which comprises of the largest human gathering in the world. This experience will help her in understanding how ritual complicates linear time and how it leads to wish fulfillment.
Tatiana Padilla (she/her) a postdoctoral associate at the Center for Innovation in Social Science, where her research bridges public policy, migration, and inequality. Her work leverages rigorous quantitative methods to explore the consequences of contact with the criminal legal system, in particular immigration enforcement, with a focus on how policies shape inequality across race, ethnicity, and legal status.

Tatiana received an undergraduate research assistance small grant to hire a student to assist in examining whether local immigration enforcement—specifically, ICE raids—disrupting the transition from high school to college among Hispanic youth. They will explore whether these effects vary by local policy context, such as sanctuary policies or 287(g) agreements, to better understand how immigration enforcement contributes to racial disparities in education.

Alexis Peri (she/her) is an Associate Professor of History, focusing on the history of the Russian empire and Soviet Union. She focuses on the history of modern Russia and Eastern Europe, especially the Soviet period with strong interests in the history of war, terror, intimacy and private life, women, US-Soviet relations, diaries, letters, literature in history, and environmental history. 

Professor Peri was awarded a small grant to travel to Bulgaria for two weeks this summer in support of her co-research and co-writing of an environmental history of the Crimean War (1853-1856), arguing that the biophysical conditions had a major impact on the trajectory and outcome of the war. She will use the mini-grant to visit archives and libraries to research the first stage of the war, which took place in modern-day Bulgaria.

Brooke Rothamer (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in Biological Anthropology. Her research investigates patterns of biological and social influences on children’s relationships across development in Utila, Honduras.

Brooke received a travel small grant to visit a collaborator’s lab at Washington State University to train in endocrine laboratory methods. She will be assisting in the processing and analysis of dried blood spot samples for biomarker levels.

Brandon Sullivan (he/his) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science, studying the political economy of security, finance, and emerging technology. His current research examines how financial market actors conditionally support peace and how states extend guarantees to markets during periods of uncertainty.

Brandon was awarded a travel small grant to further his work on his project which examines how banking and finance professionals in the US respond to geopolitical disruptions in global trade, using survey experiments to assess their support for state intervention under varying risk conditions. By investigating the limits of economic pacifism, the study sheds light on how market actors’ preferences shift during times of uncertainty.

Samantha Vee (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in biological anthropology whose research focuses on the behavior and physiology of wild Bornean orangutans. Her dissertation uses an eco-immunological framework to examine how variation in diet and sociality shapes energetic trade-offs with immune function in this species. This work offers a novel perspective on the strategies orangutans use to survive in highly variable and challenging environments.


Samantha received a travel small grant to travel to her field site at Gunung Palung National Park in Indonesia to assess the feasibility of conducting in-field assays for hormones and other urinary biomarkers. Success in this pilot project will significantly advance her dissertation progress and contribute to local capacity-building efforts.

Arjun Vishwanath (he/him) is an assistant professor in political science. He researches representation and public opinion in American politics. Much of his ongoing work explores the nature of voters’ values and how these values relate to other attitudes along with legislators’ actions.


Professor Vishwanath was awarded a research supplies small grant to evaluate whether voters employ values to evaluate policy positions. In particular, he uses a survey framework to test whether voters’ policy stances can be explained by a utility function derived from their value prioritization.

Chas Walker (he/his) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science. Broadly, his research interests relate to the economic and racial inequalities that shape American politics, and the efforts and strategies of organized groups and social movements to alter this configuration of power. He earned his BA in African American Studies at Brown University, and then worked for two decades as a community and union organizer in Rhode Island, primarily with SEIU District 1199 New England.
Chas was awarded a travel small grant to support costs associated with travel to the American Political Science Association (APSA) annual meeting in September in Vancouver, where Chas is presenting two working papers from his dissertation research into Black workers and the public sector union upsurge of the 1960s in the United States. By examining the last major wave of US union growth and the political developments and conflicts which preceded it, he aims to contribute to both scholarly and popular knowledge and to the ongoing debate about 21st century union revitalization.

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