Past Grantees and Fellows

Manville's 2016 fellowship helped him complete two journal articles, and also led to a productive collaboration with ISS fellow Adam Levine, resulting in an additional journal article.

Medical practice variation — individuals with the same characteristics and medical symptoms being prescribed different treatments — is a long-standing and widespread problem. This research proposes a method to discover medical practice variation given historical prescribing data, and evaluates personalized, generative AI-based interventions to reduce such variation in the field.

This research develops approaches and datasets to train LLMs to be logically rational (eg. that do not express self-contradictory beliefs). Our work will enable using LLMs to accurately simulate human responses to information treatments, such as persuasion and propaganda, and thus reduce researchers' and practitioners' reliance on costly belief elicitation from human subjects.

Do technology clusters of firms affect the direction of local university researchers’ academic research and inspire more applied, commercializable research? By taking advantage of the announcement of previously-unanticipated entry of high-tech firms, we will identify the causal effect of technology clusters on scientists’ research direction.

Food systems actors are fundamental for transformation, yet exhibit diverse priorities, preferred pathways, and power. We intend to build a stakeholder database and pilot visualization tool of several thousand actors across US food systems, serving as a rich resource to support future research and outreach.

The project eventually led to two NIH grants and many publications on tobacco warning labels and advertising.

Mauro's project seeks to understand why some democracies redistribute more than others. Mauro will utilize archival records of private correspondence among political elites from twentieth century Colombia to understand the inner-world of their traditional two-party system, and why elites were able to resist redistributive factions so effectively.

This grant allowed deep and multi-method exploration of the equity implications of the  implementation of Universal PreK in NYS. We also discovered a negative impact of UPK programming on infant and toddler care in rural communities. This led to conference papers, a Hatch grant, and Sipple, Casto & McCabe (2020). Child Care Deserts in New York State: Factors Related to the Community Capacity to Care for Children. Early Childhood Research Quarterly.

Transitions to renewable energy systems will falter if inadequate attention is paid to public engagement with promising new technologies like deep geothermal systems. This project investigates public opinion about deep geothermal to advance social science research on this topic and solidify a policy-engaged, trans-Atlantic collaboration.

Led to one conference presentation and an NIH grant proposal, which was not funded.

The conference "Kings & Dictators: The legacy of monarchy and the new authoritarianism in Asia" was held April 13-14, 2018. It included both external invitees and Cornell speakers, and attracted a large Cornell audience, including students in a course timed to coincide with it.

Assisted grad student lab on local manifestations of neoliberalism, resulting in an edited book, Contesting Development. Critical Struggles for Social Change (Routledge, 2010).

This project examines how the labor of journalism is being reconfigured through the structures and incentives of the social media economy. Specifically, I consider how subscription platforms like Substack, which successfully serve both digital journalists and social media creators, are shaping future news cultures.

Jane Mendle's time at ISS helped her complete two journal articles, write a grant proposal funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child and Human Development, and submit a proposal for a textbook on Developmental Psychopathology that will be published by Macmillan.

Mendoza used semi-structured interviews to uncover the experiences, responses to, and consequences of housing precarity among mixed-status Latinx immigrant families in southern California. The funding helped with a transcription service. Preliminary findings demonstrate that a lack of legal status restricts individuals’ access to and participation in various social and economic benefits, which in turn inhibit their ability to find adequate housing.