Past Grantees and Fellows

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 research builds upon recent work illuminating that biographical elements of a resource’s discovery can influence consumer preference for otherwise identical resources. Specifically, this project explores how consumer preference for resources is influenced by awareness of whether the discoverer was a human or a machine.

Through one-on-one interviews with recent participants, this project evaluates the North Country Fruit and Vegetable Prescription Program’s impact on rural health, food security, and social support, addressing data collection challenges and enriching the understanding of program outcomes beyond standard surveys.

Gangrade recruited research participants for a virtual study exploring factors that influence snacking behaviors among adolescents from low-income, urban environments. The funding enabled her to conduct 30 phone interviews with adolescents from low-income neighborhoods in NYC during the Covid-19 pandemic.

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.

NYC matches students to public high schools through an algorithm. We study the process’s design details: what drives educational inequity? What is the role of students’ ranked lists or school policies in prioritizing grades or geography? Our analyses will inform student-side interventions and policy recommendations.

Chinese newsvendor (stocking level while facing random demand) decision makers focused more on salvage value (money that can be recouped from leftover inventory) and more willing to come up with a numerical order quantity that was different from the ones mentioned in the task.

This project synthesizes concepts from political science and computational linguistics to guide the development of tools valuable for their capacity to promote critical thinking about how controversial issues are variously framed by different parties. 

Government support for clean energy innovation is critical to reducing the costs of addressing climate change. We will use novel data and empirical methods to study the impact of Department of Energy research and development funding. Our results will inform energy innovation policy.

This project analyzes visual and textual features in a small corpus of Instagram posts by dairy farmers to explore the persuasive role of social media in the discursive construction of dairy farming. Implications for moral evaluations of animals and farming practices are discussed.

This award supported research that became the 2009 paper "Characterizing Copyright in the Classroom: The Cultural Work of Anti-Piracy Campaigns" in Communication, Culture, & Critique

With the support of this award, Gillespie laid the groundwork for his widely-cited 2010 article "The Politics of Platforms" published in New Media & Society.

As international migration continues to rise, countries of origin have played an increasing role in engaging their emigrants; however, we know little about how they are being held accountable for the services offered to their diasporas. To fill the gap, this book analyzes on-the-ground, transnational defense of migrant labor rights.

The QuIRI grant enabled ILR Professor Shannon Gleeson to defray publication costs for her book manuscript "Portable Rights: Bringing the Sending State Back into the Local" (with Xóchitl Bada, under contract with the University of California Press). During this funding period, the research team prepared demographic tables and other figures for the introductory chapters, consolidated a database for the methodological appendix, and submitted chapter drafts to convenings hosted by the American Sociological Association, Texas A&M and the University of Colorado. The book will be under full review by Fall 2021, with an expected publication date of late 2022.

Citizens and experts alike can influence regulatory processes primarily through public notice and comment. Generative AI threatens this democratic expression. Can generative AI skew representation by overwhelming response pools with technically sophisticated comments perceived by regulators to be as informative as those written by experts?