This year we awarded six summer fellowships.

Dipanwita Barai (economic sciences) examines how COVID-19 impacted the global food system with shocks to demand, supply, and, consequently, international trade of meats and grains. Specifically, she is focusing on how the lockdown of businesses and other actions such as social distancing impacted the supply chain, food, and services systems as well as international trade of meat and grain. Her investigation of the impact of COVID-19 on U.S. meat and grain industry uses a reduced form gravity model and counter factual analysis to examine the new deaths and increased vaccinations in the United States contributed to levels of U.S. meat exports.

Jeffrey Deminchuk’s (political science) research explores how social media has contributed to the trend of rising affective polarization. His related projects involve firstly a theoretical examination of how our evolved coalitional psychology interacts with the online social media environment in ways that exacerbates intergroup conflict. The second part of the project involves experimentally testing how moral-emotive social media posts make group identities more salient and increase willingness to respond in a hostile manner either in defense of the in-group or by attacking the outgroup, corresponding with an increase in affective polarization. While there is compelling circumstantial and correlational evidence for social media’s role in the rise of affective polarization, his study will help test for a causal relationship. 

William Favell (political science) will use his fellowship to conduct a survey experiment to examine in-group and out-group norm comprehension along partisan lines in the United States and the interaction between this comprehension and social capital. Following the identification of group norms among the participants, a secondary test regarding how out-group members “ought” to act will be compared to the self-identified in-group norms to calculate out-group understanding. This will present a measure of out-group norm comprehension, which can be analyzed alongside the measures of social capital to test the relationship. These funds will utilized on the survey platform Prolific, which will enable the collection of a larger, cross-country sample to answer important questions about American political distrust and norms.

Achyut Paudel’s (biological systems engineering) project is focused on precision nitrogen management in apple orchards. Although nitrogen is one of the important nutrients required by apple trees for their growth and fruit production, farmers can over-fertilize, which is detrimental both to the environment and the trees. Working with farmers on this project, he used the funds to purchase a state-of-the-art depth sensor to obtain high quality images with depth information from trees. This is used to identify the exact nitrogen requirements of the tree to reduce the excessive amounts of fertilizers currently being used.

Kate Shantry’s (anthropology) study considers human use of a disturbed landscape to implement ecological management practices with social implications on the Northwest Coast of North America. In the case of the Osceola Mudflow in southern Puget Sound, the archaeological record suggests rapid human reoccupation following the abrupt Middle Holocene geological event. The goals of her study are firstly to examine the strategies enacted by coastal foothill-dwelling hunter-fisher-gatherers to survive in the short and long-term, secondly to contextualize foothill settlement patterns through multiple analytical and historical data lines in the mid-Holocene, and finally to explore landscape management and renewal techniques used to thrive in the newly formed landscape, which may be used to inform future disaster planning.

Kathryn Sheridan Stiefel’s (education) research project focuses on the lived experiences of young adults with intellectual disabilities across a range of educational settings to highlight their perceptions of belonging, inclusion, and exclusion in different educational spaces. She utilizes retrospective interpretative phenomenological analysis to provide a space in which young adults with intellectual disabilities provide critical insight regarding how special education policy is implemented and experienced by students for whom these policies are designed.