Meet the CISS 2025-26 Pilot Grant Winners
CISS has awarded four $5,000 pilot grants to researchers applying interdisciplinary lenses and methods to cutting-edge social issues. Each year, CISS invites proposals for such research projects. Learn more about the recipients and their projects below.
Richard Currie (SHA) is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Psychology at Boston University’s School of Hospitality Administration whose research focuses on workplace dynamics, with an emphasis on knowledge management, workplace turnover, and scale development. He regularly publishes and contributes as a reviewer for leading academic journals in organizational psychology and hospitality management. Professor Currie’s project, “Worker Perceptions of Anti-Turnover Climate“, investigates the concept of anti-turnover climate, exploring how organizational efforts to reduce employee turnover may unintentionally create workplace environments that are hostile to workers considering voluntary job changes. By developing and validating a novel measurement tool, this study aims to expand research on workplace retention strategies and their unintended consequences, particularly within the hospitality industry.
Sarah Miller (CAS/Sociology) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology whose work contributes to scholarship on youth, education, and new media. Her recent book project, The Tolerance Generation: Growing Up Online in an Anti-Bullying Era, ethnographically explores how teens grapple with bullying in the digital age and the industry designed to prevent it. In addition to support from BU’s Center for Innovation in Social Science, Dr. Miller’s research has been funded by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, National Science Foundation, and the American Sociological Association. Her project, “Exploring the Intersectional Impacts of School Shooting Threats on K-12 Education Aims, Significance, and Impact”, explores the impact of school shooting threats on young people’s experiences of K-12 education and how they are reconfiguring inequalities within school communities. Research will include a national survey, content analysis of school shooting threat-related media and digital discourse, ethnographic observations of active shooter response trainings and events run by the student movement to end gun violence, and approximately 200 interviews with educators and young adults.
Zachary Mondesire (Pardee) is an anthropologist and assistant professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. In his research, he thinks about the institutional life of emancipatory ideas in postcolonial Africa and beyond. Professor Mondesire’s project, “Reinventing Togetherness”, seeks to think critically about the operations and ideas that animate a network of non-denominational development agencies known as the Aga Khan Development Network. This project asks what it is to enact a universalist principle of progressive international solidarity?
Benjamin Pyle (LAW) is a lawyer and economist at BU law. He teaches and writes in empirical legal studies, employment law, and criminal law, with a particular focus on how the law influences employment prospects and post-conviction opportunities for people with criminal records and the labor market for lawyers. His work builds and analyzes new sources of high-quality data to causally measure the impact of policy changes. Professor Pyle’s project, “VII Enforcement, Education, and Women’s Representation in Law”, will build a novel lawyer-firm dataset spanning over nearly a century. Using this data we will evaluate the impact of anti-discrimination litigation on women’s representation at law firm’s in the 1970’s and 1980’s as well as measuring the impact of the War on Poverty’s legal services program (LSP) on the labor market for lawyers, which provided subsidized legal assistance to less resourced communities.