Pardee Center Announces 2015 Graduate Summer Fellows

The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future is pleased to announce the 2015 Pardee Graduate Summer Fellows. These nine outstanding Boston University graduate students represent various schools and departments from across the university, including Earth & Environment, Political Science, Public Health, Biology, Sociology, and Mathematics & Statistics.

Starting June 1st, the Graduate Summer Fellows will spend 10 weeks at the Pardee House developing research papers to be considered for publication as part of the Pardee Center’s publication series. In addition, Summer Fellows will participate in special programs designed to advance interdisciplinary research and learning and will interact with Pardee Center Faculty Fellows and post-docs.

The class of 2015 Pardee Graduate Summer Fellows includes:

Sahar Abi Hassan, doctoral student, Political Science
She will study the role of political trust in the emergence and consolidation of populist politics, focusing specifically on the cases of Venezuela and Spain.

Eliza Garfield, master’s student, Biology
She will consider the colonial nature of corals used in coral reef restoration world-wide and the implications for new restoration methodologies that could enhance long-term reef survival.

Junda Jin, doctoral student, Political Science
He will study the virtual water import in China’s international trade of agricultural goods as a water conservation strategy.

Claire Seulgie Lim, doctoral student, Political Science
She will explore the political, social and religious aspects involved in defining the political identities of Senegalese women, and how the gender parity law at the level of the National Assembly is reflected in reality.

Emily Philipp, doctoral student, Sociology
She will explore the history of U.S. foundations’ engagement with microfinance efforts to identify the characteristics of early and later financial supporters of this economic and social development strategy.

Kira Sullivan-Wiley, doctoral student, Earth and Environment
She will analyze the relationships between landslide, soil erosion, and flooding risk perceptions and risk management behaviors of small-scale farmers in the Bugisu sub-region of eastern Uganda, and investigate how those perceptions and behaviors are linked to their relationships with local and regional development and disaster risk reduction (DRR) organizations.

Andrew Trlica, doctoral student, Earth and Environment
He will research the pattern of albedo (surface brightness) and underlying urban land cover types at high spatial resolution and compare the findings to the picture presented by remote sensing data, using the Boston metropolitan area as a test case.

Maanasa Venkatesh, master’s student, Global Health
She will research whom women in India communicate with within their social networks regarding decisions about their sexual and reproductive health and how current public health communication can be tailored to specifically target chief decision makers within social networks.

Zoey Zheng, master’s student, Mathematics and Statistics
She will build a model to study the suitability and potential productivity of lands for 20 main crops in villages or provinces in Indonesia.

More information about the Pardee Center Graduate Summer Fellows Program and previous summer fellows is available here.