2024 ICER Fellows
Dr. Andrew Bloeser is an associate professor of political science at Allegheny College. He is also the director of Allegheny’s Center for Political Participation, a center the promotes civic engagement and facilitates research on democratic participation. Prior to joining the faculty at Allegheny, he worked as a community organizer with a non- profit organization on campaigns that focused on health problems experienced by working class people, including exposure to pollution in a residential neighborhood.
Dr. Youssef Chouhoud is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Christopher Newport University, where he is affiliated with the Reiff Center for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution. For the 2023-24 academic year, he served as a Public Fellow with the Public Religion Research Institute. Dr. Chouhoud’s academic scholarship models support for core democratic norms, with a particular focus on tolerance and a more general interest in how religiosity mediates social and political attitudes. He also has an extensive record of public scholarship on Muslim and Arab American opinions and behaviors.
Dr. Geneva Cole is an Assistant Professor in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2023 and was previously a postdoc in the Department of Government at William & Mary. Her research interests broadly include public opinion, political behavior, and the role of political and social identities in shaping support for racial equality. One stream of research addresses the measurement, conceptualization, and political implications of white identity in US politics. A second stream focuses on racial justice and legacies of repression in the US including policing and racial violence, historical memory projects around slavery and the confederacy, and racially restrictive housing covenants. Geneva’s research has been published in Social Science Quarterly, the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion, and Parties, and featured in public- facing outlets including MinnPost and the Washington Post Monkey Cage.
Dr. Álvaro José Corral is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. His research focuses on the voting behavior and public opinion of Latinxs in the U.S. as well as in exploring the effects of immigration enforcement on Latinx immigrant communities. Álvaro was awarded the Emerging Scholar Award by the Latino Caucus of APSA in 2023. His work has been published in Political Research Quarterly, Politics & Gender, Political Science Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, and the Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences.
Dr. Ivelisse Cuevas-Molina is an Assistant Professor of Political Science, and Associate Director of the Latin American and Latino Studies program at Fordham University. Her research interests include Latino/a/x politics, racial and ethnic politics, the politics of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States, and survey methodology. Ivelisse is currently focused on investigating the role of white identity and racial attitudes on Latino political behavior and preferences. Since 2020, she has served and continues to serve as the only non-partisan member of the New York State Independent Redistricting Commission. Her work has appeared in American Politics Research, Political Research Quarterly, Journal of Racial and Ethnic Politics, and Centro Journal.
Aparajita Datta is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Houston. Her dissertation evaluates the policy feedback effects of means-tested home energy assistance programs. She studies the burdens and disparities in program participation, and the resultant impacts on racial equity, energy justice, and climate policymaking. Aparajita also serves as a researcher at UH Energy, the energy initiative across the University of Houston System. In this role, she focuses on low-carbon technologies and policies, climate resilience, public opinion on energy affordability and carbon management, and workforce development. She is currently serving as a Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Aparajita holds a bachelor’s in computer science and engineering from the University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, India, and master’s degrees in energy management from the Bauer College of Business and public policy from the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston. Her work has appeared in PS: Political Science and Politics, Environmental Science & Technology, Frontiers in Climate, The Journal of Continuing Higher Education, Frontiers in Energy Research, and others, and media outlets like The Hill and The Houston Chronicle.
Dr. Magda Giurcanu is an assistant professor at the Undergraduate College at National Louis University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Florida and held a two-year postdoctoral position at the Institute of Political Studies, Charles University in Prague. Recently, her work has looked at community engagement and youth political activism on the West side of Chicago. Currently, Magda leads an interdisciplinary team of educators in political science, community psychology, health, and community experts through the MappCivics Youth Empowerment in Chicago — a project committed to creating spaces for informed and educated youth citizenry. Her work has been published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Party Politics, European Union Politics, Politics & Policy, Studies in Comparative International Development, Mass Communication and Society, East European Politics, and East European Politics and Societies & Cultures, among others.
Dr. Kaitlin Kelly-Thompson is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Political Science Department and Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Dean’s Office at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Kelly-Thompson’s Dissertation “There is Power in a Plaza: Social Movements, Democracy, and Spatial Politics” was awarded the 2021 Best Dissertation Award from the APSA Women, Gender, and Politics Research Section.
Natalie Jones-Kerwin graduated summa cum laude from Iowa State University with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science in the spring of 2021. She is currently a fourth-year Political Science PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specializing in American and Comparative politics. Natalie proudly identifies as a tribal member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indian tribe. In April 2022, Natalie was honored as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research fellow. Moreover, she has received recognition through awards such as the American Political Science Diversity Fellow Award, the American Political Science Association Advancing Research Fellowship for Indigenous Politics, and the SHEP American Indian Graduate Award. Her scholarly pursuits revolve around Native American political identity and behavior. In her ongoing empirical research, she aims to uncover additional mechanisms that explain the relationship between Native American identity, tribal enrollment, and political behavior. Furthermore, Natalie is committed to advancing and advocating for data sovereignty in social science research to amplify the voices of Native people in academia.
Khasan Redjaboev is a PhD candidate in Political Science in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Predoctoral Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. Khasan’s research focuses on comparative political economy of development, governance and public accountability in non-democratic regimes, social policy, and redistribution, with an empirical focus on post-communist Eurasia. In his works, Khasan employs archival research, immersive fieldworks, policy-embedded surveys and observations, large household panel surveys, and content analysis in addition to experimental research designs. Khasan co-founded and is a co-principal investigator at two long-term and externally funded collaborative research projects: Local Economic and Administrative Performance (LEAP) in Central Asia and Interdisciplinary Central Asia Politics, History and Economics (ICAPHE) Research Lab. Khasan’s works were generously funded by the Harriman Institute and Carnegie Corporation NY, Wisconsin Russia Project, Mosse Program in History, ASEEES, APSA, and others.
Arica Schuett is a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Science department at Emory University, where she is writing her dissertation on factors influencing Black electoral behavior. Her research and teaching interests include race and ethnic politics, social movements, and urban politics. Her dissertation uses administrative data and surveys to measure any diverging trends in the electoral behavior of Black voter subgroups. Arica’s work has been featured in Urban Studies and Political Science & Politics.
Dr. Jackie Vimo will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University starting in the fall of 2024. Jackie has a Ph.D. in Politics from the New School University, an M.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in Political Science from Barnard College. Jackie’s research focuses on state-level undocumented rights movements in the United States. Jackie is a queer Latinx whose family is from and lives in Argentina. In addition to academic work, Jackie has a long career in policy, advocacy, and organizing. Jackie is currently a Senior Policy Analyst overseeing the Economic Justice Program at the National Immigration Law Center and has held positions at organizations including the New York Immigration Coalition, Make the Road New York, and the New York AIDS Coalition. Jackie has taught at the City College of the City University of New York, Hunter College, the New School University, and the University of Kentucky.
Dr. Emily Wager is a postdoctoral fellow in the Political Science department at Rice University. In 2020, she earned a PhD in political science from UNC Chapel Hill where she specialized in American Politics. Prior to joining Rice, she was a Senior Social Scientist at The Movement Cooperative, where she led research that addressed questions relevant to those working in grassroots politics using field experiments, ethnography, and the analysis of election administrative data. Her research interests span across topics related to public opinion, political behavior, and policy, with a focus on race and inequality. Many of her current projects address barriers to engagement or trust in public institutions. This includes a co-authored book project examining the racially disparate impacts of Confederate symbols in public spaces on attitudes toward government, as well as work examining strategies to promote trust in election administration. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and Public Agenda.
Sophia Wang is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Yale University. Her research broadly focuses on urban and local politics in the North American and Western European context. Her dissertation research studies political inequality in local democratic institutions, local political participation including tenant activism and citizen housing policy preferences comparatively in the United Kingdom, the United States and Germany with both quantitative and qualitative methods. She is a graduate fellow at the MacMillan European Studies Council and previously a junior visiting scholar at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. She holds an MA in Economics as well as MPhil in Political Science from Yale University and a BA in World Politics (with honor) and Mathematics from Hamilton College.
Dr. Katie Zuber is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York and a fellow at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, State University of New York. She is Co-Principal Investigator on the Stories from Sullivan project, which examines how opioid misuse affects local communities and what local communities are doing to respond. In addition, Katie has researched and written extensively on state and local government issues, including the role of experimentation in addressing social problems to the implementation of public health and criminal justice initiatives in New York State. She has worked on several collaborative projects featured in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory; Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law; Law & Society Review; and Justice System Journal, among others. Katie received her doctorate in political science from the University at Albany, State University of New York in 2017.