Spotlight: Purdue PhD Program
BoilerUp! Celebrating recent success and milestones
Hanna Sistek receives $15,000 grant from the Rapoport Family Foundation to support her dissertation research on the causes and consequences of political disinformation by political elites!
Kaleigh Karageorge was awarded a Smithsonian Environmental Justice Fellowship: Envisioning a Shared and Sustainable Future where she will work on site at the Anacostia Community Museum while utilizing their research resources in completing her dissertation.
Scovia Aweko, was selected to be a 2024 World Bank Africa Fellow!
Previously, she worked as a Behavioral Research Intern and the Center for Behavior and the Environment at Rare. Her research focuses on how external shocks shape political attitudes and behavior and explores civil war displacements.
Catalina Vega-Mendez is a Pre-doctoral Fellow
at Florida International University's Green School of International and Public Affairs where she continues her research on migration, policy, and political attitudes and behavior in Latin American.
Qian (Habi) Zhang is the World Consortium Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the James Madison Program at Princeton University. She is a comparativist with interests in totalitarianism, mass movements, ideology, propaganda, and Chinese politics, among other topics.
My time at Purdue was intellectually stimulating and
set me up for success in my academic career” Janel Jett (PhD 2022)
Dr. Janel Jett is off to a great start in her career. She joined the University of Oregon this year as a tenure track assistant professor in political science, after holding an NCEC Sloan Foundation Postdoctoral Research Scholar fellowship with the New Carbon Economy Consortium in the Harry S. Truman School of Government and Public Affairs and the Social Cognition of Social Change Lab at the University of Missouri. She credits her success to the training she received, research funding support, participation in external programs including IQMR and ICPSR, and the many opportunities to collaborate with fellow graduate students and faculty in multiple departments at Purdue.
Dr. Jett and former graduate colleague Dr. Amber Lusvardi (PhD 2022) collaborated on a paper with Dr. Jenn Hoewe and Dr Eric Weimer in Purdue's Brian Lamb School of Communication that has been published in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, “Selection, Trust, and the Effects of Cable News Consumption.” Dr. Jett notes that “Graduate school plays a crucial role in forging enduring collaborations…that will continue to shape my professional journey.”
Recent Purdue Ph.D.s Win Best Dissertation Awards!
Dr. Amber Lusvardi (PhD 2022) Assistant Professor at University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, recently won the Best Dissertation Award from the APSA State Politics and Policy section for her dissertation The End of the Child Bride: Social Movements, Strategic Actions, and State Level Policymaking on Underaged Marriage.
Dr. Jasmin Jackson (PhD 2022), Assistant Professor at Texas Christian University, received the Western Political Science Association's Best Dissertation Award for her dissertation The Knowledge Within: Conceptualizing African American Political Knowledge. Dr. Jackson's work also received the Purdue College of Liberal Art's Distinguished Dissertation Award.
More Student Spotlights
Sky Kunkel has been busy! After receiving the PhD in 2024, Sky has moved to a Post-doctoral Fellow position at the Gender and Security Sector (GSS) Lab at Cornell University. In 2023-24 they held the Predoctoral Research Fellow at the GSS Lab at Cornell and was selected to be a United States Institute of Peace (USIP) Scholar. Sky’s research focuses on the intersection of security and non-state actors, particularly evaluating how, when, and where United Nations peacekeepers effectively protect civilians. Kunkel applies advanced methods of causal inference to uncover the effects of nonstate actors on violence. They have presented work at the Political Methodology Meetings, ISA, Peace Science, and other conferences. Recently, Kunkel presented “Who Keeps the Peace? Gendered Effects in UN Peacekeeping” at a September 25, 2023, Political Science Research Workshop. This work suggests women peacekeepers are more important in maintaining peace than previously thought.
One PhD is not enough for Owura Kuffour! He is pursuing PhD’s in Political Science and Education. He is a regular winner of our department’s award given to graduate students who publish peer-reviewed research. He will keep the streak going as he and collaborators recently published “International Remittances and Political Participation in Ghana” in Scientific African. We love it when faculty and graduate students publish open access peer-reviewed work!
Kuffour also contributed to a collaborative publication in PS: Political Science & Politics. He discusses the ways that participating in a research lab as an undergraduate student prepared him for the next steps in his career. The article “Undergraduate and Political Science Research: Insights from Research Assistants in a Minority-Serving Institution Lab” is open access and shares valuable perspectives!