Pardee Center Announces 2014 Graduate Summer Fellows

The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future is pleased to announce the 2014 Pardee Graduate Summer Fellows. These seven outstanding Boston University graduate students represent various schools and departments from across the university, including Earth & Environment, History, International Relations, Public Health, and Political Science.

Starting May 27th, the Graduate Summer Fellows will spend 10 weeks at the Pardee House developing research papers to be considered for publication as part of the Pardee Center’s publication series. In addition, Summer Fellows will participate in special programs designed to advance interdisciplinary research and learning and will regularly interact with Pardee Center Faculty Fellows.

The class of 2014 Pardee Graduate Summer Fellows includes:

Cantay Caliskan, doctoral student, Political Science
He will compare the effectiveness of different investment mechanisms and policies for developing renewable energy programs in advanced and emerging nations, focusing on the relationship between feed-in tariffs, investment, and renewable energy production.

Lilly Havstad, doctoral student, History
She will look at changing food preferences in Maputo, Mozambique based on historic food-related discourse in printed media to gain an understanding of the socioeconomic and cultural factors related to food distribution, rising obesity rates, and persistent under-nutrition in a developing world context.

Sarah Hill, masters student, International Relations & Environmental Policy
She will study the use of oil, fertilizers, and other chemicals in European industrial livestock production and the resulting impact on regional greenhouse gas emissions, focusing specifically on options for reducing emissions to make livestock production more sustainable.

Xiaoman Huang, doctoral student, Earth & Environment
She will use remote sensing technology to map land-use change from agriculture to urbanization in China from 2000 to 2012 with the goal of developing improved data sets for exploring the impacts of urban growth.

Abhishek Sharma, masters student, School of Public Health
He will study the use of Haemophillus influenza type b (Hib) vaccines in India, looking specifically at out-of-pocket expenditures, socioeconomic inequalities, and market dynamics to assess the feasibility of introducing the vaccine into India’s national immunization program.

Xiaojing Tang, doctoral student, Earth & Environment
He will develop a long-term forest disturbance model to investigate how changes in forested areas impact biodiversity in Tonlé Sap Lake in the Lower Mekong Basin, a region of Cambodia where more than 2 million people are highly dependent upon ecosystem services such as fisheries and agricultural production.

Laurie Wissler, masters student, International Relations & Environmental Policy
She will research efforts taken by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil to mitigate food security issues in developing countries, such as Indonesia and Malaysia, where the growing global demand for palm oil has led to increasing rates of deforestation and small farm conversion to palm oil plantations.

More information about the Pardee Center Graduate Summer Fellows Program and previous summer fellows is available here.