2025–26 Buffett Research Fellows: Buffett Institute for Global Affairs

2025–26 Buffett Research Fellows

The Buffett Research Fellowship Program awards fellowships of one to four quarters to doctoral students in years 3-5 whose research deals with subjects outside the contiguous United States and/or within Tribal Nations. Learn about the 2025–26 cohort of Buffett Research Fellows below.

LEARN MOR ABOUT BUFFETT'S RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM

2025–26 Research Fellows

Pedro Bitencourt

Economics, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Pedro Bitencourt is a PhD candidate in Economics at Northwestern University. He is interested in applied microeconomics, specifically in heavily regulated industries such as electricity and healthcare. He is studying the expansion of medical schools in Brazil, using administrative data to examine how the entry of new institutions affects physician quality, labor market sorting, and patient outcomes. The project sheds light on the role of state capacity and regulation in shaping the supply of skilled professionals in middle-income countries.

Rosario Cisternas

Economics, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Rosario Cisternas is a PhD candidate in Economics at Northwestern University, specializing in industrial organization, with interests in health economics and applied microeconomics. She studies how policies and market forces impact both access to and quality of healthcare services.

Sebastián Poblete Coddou

Economics, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Sebastián is a Chilean PhD candidate at the Department of Economics, where he studies the intersection of Labor Economics and Industrial Organization. Currently, he is interested in how different union bargaining schemes can help workers countervail the exercise of market power (the ability of firms to pay less than the workers' productivity in order to raise more profits) of their employers. Methodologically, Sebastián uses tools from the regulation literature and general bargaining theory to simulate different bargaining scenarios between firms and unions, using Chilean data as the case study, in collaboration with the country's Central Bank. He is also interested in educational regulation and the economics of strikes.

Arne Holverscheid

Political Science, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Arne Holverscheid is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University where he studies Comparative Politics and Political Methodology. His main academic interests are in political behavior, quantitative methods, and computational social science. Arne has previously worked in financial crime prosecution and forensic consulting.

Ling Xi Min

History, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Ling Xi Min is a PhD candidate at the Department of History. Ling's dissertation examines meaning-making and political activism among Japanese veterans of the Second World War. His broader research interests include global public history and war memory, military sociology, and war in popular culture. He is co-author of Postcard Impressions of Early 20th-Century Singapore, Perspectives from the Japanese Community, and has published 'Memories of the South,' a digital archive of Japanese language sources on the invasion and occupation of Malaya and Singapore.

Weiliang Song

History, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Weiliang Song is a PhD candidate in the Department of History, with interests in Southeast Asia and China, especially before the twentieth century, and topics including diplomacy, state-building, and religion. Her dissertation focuses on today’s central Vietnam from the 1470s to the 1830s, which saw the vanishing of Zhan Cheng (占城 Champa) and the simultaneous rise of the largest Vietnamese empire ruled by the Nguyễn family. Her research draws on Sino-Vietnamese, French, and Cham primary sources and methods such as data analysis, textual analysis, and fieldwork.

Vivian Tompkins

Musicology, Bienen School of Music

Vivian Tompkins is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Northwestern University. She is interested in the intersection of music, religion, and gender. Her dissertation focuses on women’s devotional music-making in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, analyzing women’s use of religious songbooks in order to reveal the close imbrication of devotional music and English ideologies of femininity.