Graduate Student Funding Awardees
The Buffett Institute is proud to support graduate student research and professional growth in order to nurture the next generation of interdisciplinary global scholars. View a list of graduate students who have been awarded funding from Northwestern Buffett in previous years.
Graduate Student Research Travel Award
These awards support Northwestern doctoral candidates and terminal master’s students who are conducting dissertation research outside the United States, for projects that address one or more of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Learn more >>2022–23
Nnaemeka Ekwelum
Black Studies, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Nnaemeka Ekwelum received the Graduate Student research travel award in 2022. With our support, Nnaemeka participated in an in-person weaving residency at an eco-conscious fashion atelier (Diakwu Cloth) in Aubja, Nigeria. They also conducted interviews, studio/site visits, and ethnographic observations of African artists who are working at the intersection of environmental justice and textile art. Nnaemeka researches the contributions of textile/weaving artists across the Black diaspora to contemporary discourses on global climate change and environmental justice.
Cordelia Rizzo
Performance Studies, School of Communication
Cordelia Rizzo received the Graduate Student research travel award in 2023. With our support, Cordelia travelled to Northern Ireland, United Kingdom and Monterrey, Mexico to work on her participatory textile project #abrazoentramado (#wovenhug). Her research is on touch-focused sensing explorations, such as those in textile work as sophisticated acts of political resistance to militarized violence.
Malú Rose
Performance Studies, School of Communication
Malú Rose received the Graduate Student research travel award in 2023. With our support, Malú conducted interviews in Peru, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador. During their field work, Malú also built collaborative relationships with artist/activist partners. Malú Rose dissertation work involves several projects related to the theme, “Ungovernable”, an investigation into the fraught relationship between minoritarian subjects and the nation-state. Their research attends to the work of queer and trans of color artists and the everyday practices of feminist and sexually dissident movements in Latin America.
Aoi Saito
History, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Aoi Saito received the Graduate Student research travel award in 2023. With our support, Aoi conducted interviews on community health practices of Japanese Prostitutes at the Asakusa Geisha Office in Tokyo. Aoi’s research shows that Japanese prostitutes created homosocial networks for community welfare and collective navigation of legal challenges and social stigma which not only represented their capability for supporting themselves but also influenced state welfare policies.
Johnae Strong
Documentary Media, School of Communication
Johnae Strong received the Graduate Student research travel award in 2022. With our support, Johnae conducted interviews with Black mothers of formerly incarcerated and presently incarcerated children, latinx mothers activated by the surge of deportations by ICE, and mothers impacted by immigration and war in foreign countries. Johnae uses film and sound to depict oral histories of mutual support and communal strategies of Black Women to combat problems of health and wellness.
2021–22
Hossein Alidaee
Economics, Kellogg School of Business
Hossein Alidaee received the Graduate Student Travel Research Award in 2022. With our support, Hossein traveled to Bangladesh to examine the utilization of social learning in the context of agricultural technologies. The end goal of the project is to improve agricultural technology adoption in similar regions.
Sofyan Ansori
Anthropology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Sofyan Ansori received the Graduate Student research travel award in 2022. With our support, Sofyan travelled to Indonesia and Malaysia to conduct research for the project “Conservative Politics and the Proliferation of Conversion Therapy Practices in Indonesia.”Maryam Athari
Art History, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Maryam Athari received the Graduate Student Travel Research Award in 2022. With our support, Maryam traveled to Iran and Dubai to conduct research toward developing an alternative framework for studying artistic modernism in Iran by introducing the concept of jahani, a Farsi term that encapsulates how Iranian cultural arbiters understood scales of modern human experience. It presents a case in which non-Western intellectuals, through their creative practice, generate epistemologies for better understanding their own modern cultural and social thought, resisting colonial modernity, and recourse to essentialist discourses of national identity.
Lauren Baker
Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Lauren Baker received the Graduate Student Travel Research Award in 2022. With our support, Lauren traveled to Glasgow, Scotland for the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) to explore how notions of environmentalism translate across socioeconomic and geographic contexts. This project examines how different actors across levels within cycles of production and consumption interpret and interact with waste.
Nicholas Bascuñan-Wiley
Sociology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Nicholas Bascuñan-Wiley received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2022. With our support, Nicholas travelled and conducted fieldwork at a Palestinian bakery in the Patronato neighborhood of Santiago, Chile, the largest Palestinian diaspora outside the Arab world. Nicholas research is on the everyday affective and sensory experiences of migrant belonging and the role of cultural connections in resisting symbolic and legal erasure.
Sarah Breiter
Anthropology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Sarah Breiter received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2022. With our support, Sarah travelled to the United Kingdom to conduct research for the project “Buildings as Ecological Proxies: The Environmental Impact of the Transition to Agrarian Capitalism in Early Modern Suffolk.”Ming-hsi Chu
History, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Ming-hsi Chu received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2022. With our support, Ming-hsi travelled to China, Japan, England, and across the U.S. to conduct research for the project“The Mother of All Government Affairs: Law and the Transformation of Chinese Tax Culture in Global Context, 1912-1952.”Diana Elhard
Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Diana Elhard received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2021. With our support, Diana attended and conducted fieldwork at the 26th meeting of Conference of Parties on Climate Change at Glasgow, Scotland. Diana’s dissertation research examines the role of vulnerability in international climate finance and how it is shaped through the decisions of UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Green Climate Fund.
Daniel Encinas
Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Daniel Encinas received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2022. With our support, Daniel travelled to Peru to conduct research for the project
“Shaking the Political Arena: The Institutional Legacies of Civil Wars.”Mallory Fallin
Sociology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Mallory Fallin received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2021. With our support, Mallory attended and conducted fieldwork at the 26th meeting of Conference of Parties on Climate Change at Glasgow, Scotland. Mallory’s dissertation research addresses how climate change discourses about future life and death are incorporated in global health agendas and the temporal inequalities therein in the exacerbated impact of climate change for vulnerable and disadvantaged communities.
Dexter Fergie
History, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Dexter Fergie received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2022. With our support, Dexter travelled to India, Britain, and France to conduct research for the project “Headquartering the World: American Power and the Space of Global Governance, 1945-1980.”Nora Gavin-Smyth
Plant Biology and Conservation, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Nora Gavin-Smyth received the Graduate Student Travel Research Award in 2022. With our support, Nora traveled to Tanzania for research focusing on genomics, taxonomy, and conservation within the Eastern Arc mountains. The project works to protect biodiversity and halt biodiversity loss and seeks to establish a reserve of genetically diverse germplasm for conservation and restoration of these rare species.
Bo Won Kim
Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Bo Won Kim received the Graduate Student Travel Research Award in 2022. With our support, Bo traveled to the UN Office for Drug and Crime (UNODC) in Vienna, Austria to explore why international institutions enforce various issues of illicit trafficking so differently. The project looked at the effectiveness of institutions in reducing crime and examining which types of monitoring and remedial designs work at the international level to strengthen relevant national institutions.
Mauricio Oportus Preller
Spanish and Portuguese, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Mauricio Oportus Preller received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2022. With our support, Mauricio conducted archival research at Ibero-American Institute in Berlin, Germany. Mauricio’s research on literary representations of the law in the Latin American modern fiction examines the role of public intellectuals and writers in challenging the legal discourse of state consolidation in Latin American nations.
Febi Ramadhan
Anthropology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Febi Ramadhan received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2022. With our support, Febi travelled to Indonesia and Malaysia to conduct research for the project “Conservative Politics and the Proliferation of Conversion Therapy Practices in Indonesia.”Sophie Reilly
Anthropology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Sophie Reilly received the Graduate Student Travel Research Award in 2022. With our support, Sophie traveled to Peru to investigate the deep histories of food (in)security, specifically how colonialism affects local food systems, and the strategies communities develop to mitigate these impacts. Sophie’s project emphasizes the importance of history in understanding and crafting solutions to food (in)security.
Eunike Setiadarma
History, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Eunike Setiadarma received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2022. With our support, Eunike travelled to the Netherlands to conduct research for the project “The Craft of Care: Home Life and the Politics of Everyday Knowledge and Emotions in Indonesia, 1900s-1960s.”Ely Orrego Torres
Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Ely Orrego Torres received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2022. With our support, Ely attended Civil Society Dialogues at two international meetings of the Organization of American States. Ely conducted ethnographic fieldwork at these two meetings on the avenues provided for civil society organizations to come together and develop regional and transnational networks. Her dissertation research addresses how these civil society organizations define religious freedom and secularism.
Emma Zajedela
Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics, McCormick School of Engineering
Emma Zajedela received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2022. With our support, Emma travelled and liaised with collaborators at filming sites for their firefly behavioral study in Thailand. Emma’s dissertation research addresses how human induced light pollution effects bioluminescenct communication for courtship among fireflies and threatens their extinction.
2020–21
Andrea Adomako
Black Studies, Weinberg Colleges of Arts & Sciences
Andrea Adomako received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2020. With our support, Andrea travelled to Ghana to conduct research for the project "‘Because We Failed Her’: Black Girl Friendships, Violences, and Voids in Youth Literature from 1969-1976."Claire Arnold
History, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Claire Arnold, received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2020. With our support, Claire travelled to the United Kingdom to conduct research for the project “Demands of Distance: British Families in the World 1815-1914.”Jessy Bell
Art History, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Jessy Bell received the Graduate Student research travel award in 2020. With our support, Jessy travelled to Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina to conduct research for the project “‘We Build the Highway, The Highway Builds Us’: Infrastructure and Imagination in Sociality Yugoslavia (1945-1980).”Samantha Kassirer
Management & Organizations, Kellogg School of Management
Samantha Kassirer received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2020. With our support, Andrea travelled to Kenya to conduct research for the project “Impacts of Giver Salience on Recipients of Aid.”Hamed Yousefi Koupai
Art History, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Hamed Yousefi Koupai received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2020. With our support, Hamed travelled to France, Canada, and across the US to conduct research for the project “The Secularity of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths: Art and Islam in Iran During the Cold War.”Christopher Montague
Black Studies, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Christopher Montague received the Graduate Student research travel award in 2021. With our support, Christopher travelled to the United Kingdom, Jamaica, and Nigeria to conduct research for the project “Anticolonial Internationalism: Forging Globality in Black Politics”2019–20
Jacob Aronoff
Anthropology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Jacob Aronoff received the Graduate Student research travel award in 2019. With our support, Jacob travelled to Gambia to conduct research for the project “Investigating the impact of malnutrition on child brain development using doppler ultrasound measures of total cerebral blood flow as a proxy for global brain energy expenditure.”Yannick Coenders
Sociology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Yannick Coenders received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2020. With our support, Andrea travelled to the United Kingdom and the Netherlands to conduct research for the project“Dispersal: How Cities in the West Abandoned Racial Segregation.”Ali Faraj
Performance Studies, School of Communications
Ali Faraj received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2020. With our support, Ali travelled to the United Kingdom to conduct research for the project “Un-Commonwealth: Rare African-American Soul Records as Subcultural Capital in the Northern Soul Music Scene”Seyma Kabaoglu
Anthropology, Weinberg College of Arts & Science
Seyma Kabaoglu received the Graduate Student research travel award in 2020. With our support, Seyma travelled to Turkey to conduct research for the project “The Everyday Life of Islamic Banking and Finance in Istanbul, Turkey.”Jeremy Kuperberg
Sociology, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
Jeremy Kuperberg received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2020. With our support, Jeremy travelled to Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia to conduct research for the project “Performing the Nation After War: Tourism and Memory in the Yugoslav Region."Jimmy Lee
Economics, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
Jimmy Lee received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2019. With our support, Jimmy travelled to Liberia to conduct research for the project “Information Frictions in Intergenerational Communication of Schooltaught Agricultural Knowledge: A Field Experiment in Liberia.”Melissa Manus
Anthropology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Melissa Manus received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2020. With our support, Melissa travelled to Mexico to conduct research for the project “The Influence of the Social Environment on the Infant Skin Microbiome.”Caitlin Monroe
History, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Caitlin Monroe received the Graduate Student research travel award in 2019. With our support, Caitlin travelled to Uganda, the United Kingdom, and Italy to conduct research for the project “Education, women's knowledge, and the production of history in Western Uganda, 1860-1980.”Sonia Planson
Sociology, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
Sonia Planson received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2019. With our support, Sonia travelled to France to conduct research for the project “Assimilation Norms and Cultural Maintenance Among Immigrants, a US-France Comparison.”Dilpreet Singh
Anthropology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Dilpreet Singh received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2020. With our support, Dil travelled to Ethiopia to conduct research for the project “Making People, Making Death: Tradition, Globalism, and the Archaeology of Living Death in Ethiopia."Qi Song
Sociology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Qi Song received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2020. With our support, Qi travelled to China and across the U.S. to conduct research for the project “‘Data as the New Oil?’ Uncovering Data Production in the Artificial Intelligence Industry as a Social Process”Miguel Talamas
Strategy/MEDS, Kellogg School of Management
Miguel Talamas received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2020. With our support, Seyma travelled to Mexico to conduct research for the project “David vs. Goliath: Mexican Corner Stores Facing Convenience Chains."Francesca Truffa
Economics, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
Francesca Truffa received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2019. With our support, Francesca travelled to Ghana to conduct research for the project “Effect of Beliefs and Gender Roles on Girls' Math Education”Elena Weber
Theatre and Drama, School of Communication
Elena Weber received the Graduate Student research travel award in 2020. With our support, Elena travelled to Italy to conduct research for the project “Performing the Eternal City: Popular Histories and Fascist Politics in Rome."Ashley Wong
Economics, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
Ashley Wong received the Graduate Student Research Travel Award in 2019. With our support, Ashley travelled to Ghana to conduct research for the project “Effect of Beliefs and Gender Roles on Girls' Math Education”Graduate Student Conference Travel Award
These grants fund Northwestern doctoral students and terminal master’s students who are traveling to present their research at a professional academic conference in a location outside of the United States. Learn more >>
2022–23
Bo Won Kim
Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Bo Won Kim received the Conference Travel Grant in 2023. With our support, Bo participated in the International Studies Association Conference, Montreal, Canada and presented her paper ‘Criminalization with no teeth? Designing the International regulation of firearms trafficking’. Bo researches negotiations and current institutional designs of UN Firearms Trafficking Protocols.
Colleen O’Brien
Civil and Environmental Engineering, McCormick School of Engineering
Colleen O’Brien received the Conference Travel Grant in 2022. With our support, Colleen attended the Malta Conference on Diplomacy through Science and presented her paper, ‘Unreliable water sources in the West Bank: Revealing the challenges in Al-Walaja Village’. Colleen researches on water security in the conflict situation between Israel and Palestine.
María Palacio
Spanish & Portuguese, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
María Palacio received the Conference Travel Grant in 2023. With our support, María attended Women of the World: Literature, Language and Translation Conference at Alexandria, Egypt and presented her paper ‘Truth Memory and Gender in the Latin American Testimonio: The case of Policarpa’. As Colombia embarks on peacebuilding after years of internal conflict, María works on women’s memories and narratives with a particular focus on a guerilla combatant.
Maher Said
Civil and Environmental Engineering, McCormick School of Engineering
Maher Said received the Conference Travel Grant in 2022. With our support, Said attended the Malta Conference on Diplomacy through Science and presented his paper, ‘The Impact of Sidewalk Width and Geometry on Pedestrian Flow’. Maher researches walking environments in developing countries with targeted design for crowded regions.
Emma Zajdela
Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics, McCormick School of Engineering
Emma Zajdela received the Conference Travel Grant in 2022. With our support, Emma attended the African Conference on Research in Chemistry Education at Cairo, Egypt and presented her paper, ‘Catalyzing Collaborations: The Chemistry of team formation in virtual and in-person settings’. She researches the impact of Covid-19 on formation of new teams for research collaboration and effects on scientific collaborations in the Middle East.
2021–22
Owen Brown
Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Owen Brown received the Conference Travel Award in 2022. With our support, Owen attended the Law and Society Association Global Meeting in Lisbon, Portugal and presented a project titled “The Rules of Order: Racialization and the Production of International Order Through Law.” The project addresses the creation of racialized injustice through the law with the hope of opening a space for a reimagining and decolonizing of international law.
Laura Acosta Gonzalez
Sociology, Wenberg College of Arts and Sciences
Laura Acosta Gonzalez received the Conference Travel Award in 2022. With our support, Lauratravelled to Limerick City, Munster, Ireland to present the project “Symbolic third and war recurrence in mid-20th c. Colombia."Breniel Lemley
Media Technology & Society, School of Communication
Breniel Lemley received the Conference Travel Award in 2022. With our support, Breniel attended the International Communication Association conference in Paris, France and presented a project titled “Examining Young Children's Computational Thinking from Television.” The project seeks to provide caregivers with additional resources to support computational thinking at home and provide preschool-aged children with an opportunity to engage with these concepts in an informal context.
Rongyi (Rita) Lin
Screen Cultures, School of Communication
Rongyi (Rita) Lin received the Conference Travel Award in 2022. With our support, Rongyi attended the Visible Evidence conference in Gdansk, Poland and presented a project titled “Staging Absence: Imagining Feminist Archives for a Dispossessed Future.” The project addresses the precarious modes of mobility for women in urban spaces including prostitution in 1930s Republican Shanghai, rural-to-urban migrant women in post/socialist China, illegitimate citizenship and dispossessed urban underclasses as a result of infrastructural projects.
Mora Matassi
Communication Studies, School of Communication
Mora Matassi received the Conference Travel Award in 2022. With our support, Mora attended the International Communication Association Conference in Paris, France and presented a project titled “‘Harmful, unhealthy, addictive’: Disconnection from smartphones and moral mandates of wellbeing.” The project addresses the ways in which people discuss their (generally ambivalent and problematic) relations with smartphones as well as their motivations and practices for disconnecting from such devices.
Aulia Dwi Nastiti
Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Aulia Dwi Nastiti received the Conference Travel Award in 2022. With our support, Aulia travelled to Bangkok, Thailand to present the project “Governing the Gig: Divergent Policy Trajectory toward Platform Economy in China and Indonesia”Salih Noor
Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Salih Noor received the Conference Travel Grant in 2022. With our support, Salih travelled to Montreal, Quebec, Canada to present the project “The Political Economy of Settler States in Africa”Eliana Polimeni
Management & Organizations, Kellogg School of Management
Eliana Polimeni received the Conference Travel Award in 2022. With our support, Stiliani travelled to Berlin, Germany to present the project “Easier-Is-Better Heuristic: false allure of easy work.”Dondhup Tashi Rekjong
Religious Studies, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Dondhup Tashi Rekjong received the Conference Travel Award in 2022. With our support, Dondhup travelled to Prague, Czech Republic to present the project “The Centrality of The Dalai Lama’s Autobiography to Tibetan Secular Life Writing."Qi Song
Sociology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Qi Song received the Conference Travel grant in 2022. With our support, Qi travelled to Amsterdam, the Netherlands to present the project “Platforms as Agencies of Compliance: How Tax Reform Facilitates the Rise of Platform Economy in the Freight Transportation Sector in China."Sapna Suresh
Communication Studies, School of Communication
Sapna Suresh received the Conference Travel Award in 2022. With our support, Sapna attended the International Communication Association Conference in Paris, France and presented a project titled “Drama, Intrigue, and Discussion: The Role of Telenovelas in Facilitating Conversations about Reproductive Health in Mexican Households.” This study examines the effect of a dual-pronged entertainment-education intervention on Mexican adolescent and parental knowledge, as well as information-seeking regarding sexual and reproductive health.
Molly Weinstein
Management & Organizations, Kellogg School of Management
Molly Weinstein received the Conference Travel Award in 2022. With our support, Molly travelled to Milan, Italy to present the project “Internal corporate social responsibility units.”2019–20
Malia Bowers
Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Malia Bowers received the Conference Travel Award in 2019. With our support, Kacey travelled to Brazil to present the project “Bridging the Space Between: Feminist Activism and Hashtagged Writing in Latin America”Kacey Grauer
Anthropology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Kacey Grauer received the Conference Travel grant in 2019. With our support, Kacey travelled to Canada to present the project “Beyond Access: Inequality and Relationships with the Environment at the Ancient Maya Site of Aventura, Belize."Irene Kwon
Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Irene Kwon received the Conference Travel grant in 2019. With our support, Irene travelled to Puerto Rico to present the project “Economic and Political Determinants of Credit Rating Agenciesʼ Sovereign Debt Ratings”
Rachel Moss
Theatre and Dance, School of Communication
Rachel Moss received the Conference Travel grant in 2019. With our support, Rachel travelled across the U.S. to present the project “Skrzypek as Jewish Stand-In: Fiddler on the Roof in Poland.”Haley Ragsdale
Anthropology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Haley Ragsdale received the Conference Travel grant in 2019. With our support, Kacey travelled to Argentina to present the project “Global Variation in Placental Phenotypes: Evidence from Cebu, Philippines."
