The Weidenbaum Center is powering the next generation of policy-relevant graduate research
The Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy has awarded $45,000 for the upcoming academic year to support three exceptional PhD students in Political Science, Economics, and Sociology through the 2026-2027 Weidenbaum Graduate Fellowship. The fellows were selected by a jury of faculty members appointed by the Weidenbaum Center, based on the relevance and promise of their research to the Center’s mission of bridging scholarly work and public policy. Each fellow will receive a $5,000 research account and additional funding to support their graduate training and dissertation research.
In addition to funding, Weidenbaum Fellows are integrated into the Center’s vibrant intellectual community and gain access to unique professional development opportunities, including small-group discussions with leading scholars, policymakers, and public officials.
“We’re proud to support graduate students who are conducting rigorous, policy-relevant research,” said Weidenbaum Center Director Andrew Reeves. “I’m especially grateful to Dean Feng Sheng Hu for his partnership and commitment to graduate education and interdisciplinary scholarship which makes this all possible.”
“We’re excited to support students whose work is shaping conversations in both policy and scholarship,” added Elizabeth Pippert Larson, Weidenbaum Center Associate Director of Research & Administration.
The Weidenbaum Center also extends its sincere gratitude to Vice Dean of Research Deanna Barch and Vice Dean of Graduate Education Sophia E. Hayes for their continued engagement and collaboration. Their commitment to strengthening graduate education and interdisciplinary research in Arts & Sciences has been instrumental to continuing this fellowship program.
Below we list our 2026-27 Graduate Fellows, as well as our continuing fellows:
2026-27 Graduate Fellows
Tian Chen is a fifth-year PhD student in Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on empirical political economy, with particular attention to the political consequences of technological development such as AI and the economic and political effects of innovation policies. He employs large-scale data analysis, causal inference, and randomized experiments in his work. As a secondary research interest, he studies historical political economy and the economic history of late imperial China. In his current dissertation, he investigates how geopolitical conflicts and industrial policies have shaped firms’ innovation in China. His research is supported by the Weidenbaum Center and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. He earned his bachelor's degree in Economics from Waseda University in Japan and his master's degree in Analytical Political Economy from Duke University.
Sih-Yu (Eva) Chi is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research interests include health economics, education economics, and family economics, with a focus on how individuals and households respond to policy incentives and how these responses shape health and economic outcomes. Her current project studies how the design of government IVF policy, specifically the combination of fertility subsidies and treatment-intensity restrictions such as limits on the number of embryos transferred, affects patient decisions, provider responses, and market outcomes. She earned her B.A. and M.A. from National Taiwan University. At WashU, her research has been supported by the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy.
Armin Sauermann is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. His research investigates the culture and politics of gun ownership in the United States, integrating quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the motivations, identities, and meanings people attach to firearms, with a focus on left-wing gun owners, a population that has grown rapidly in recent years yet remains comparatively underresearched. In his current project, he interviews left-of-center Twin Cities residents at different stages of the gun ownership process, from those who decided against it to current owners. He pairs this with a computational analysis of how the same population narrates its experience online, aiming to identify how left-wing gun owners differ from the right-wing samples that have received far more attention in sociology. Before WashU, he was a researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, where he specialized in data processing and the analysis of large-scale observational data. His Master's thesis uses national survey data provided by Washington University's Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, & Public Policy, which also funded a pretest of the survey instrument, to show that social embeddedness in gun-owning networks, rather than perceived threat, predicts firearm ownership.
2025-26 Graduate Fellows (continuing)
Alex Avery is a sixth-year Ph.D. student in Political Science at Washington University. Her research examines the intersections of gender, conflict, and political behavior, with particular attention to how identity-based violence shapes women’s lives and decision-making. She is broadly interested in gender and politics, political violence, post-conflict recovery, and the political demography of conflict. Her current dissertation project, “Reproducing Identity: Ethnic Conflict and Women’s Fertility”, employs a multi-method approach—including cross-national analysis, highly detailed microdata from the Demographic and Health Surveys, an original survey experiment, and in-depth fieldwork—to investigate how ethnic conflict politicizes reproduction as a strategy for group survival. Her work is supported by the Weidenbaum Center and the American Political Science Association Centennial Center. She earned her B.A. degrees in Political Science and International Studies–Cultural Affairs from Arkansas Tech University.
Rudolph Chan is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Washington University in St. Louis. His research lies at the intersection of Labor Economics, Innovation, and Development. He focuses on uncovering novel stylized facts using micro-level data—such as firm and household datasets—and developing empirically grounded quantitative models to explore the sources and implications of labor market imperfections. One of his current projects examines how immigration influences firms' monopsony power over different types of workers, drawing on highly disaggregated data from Colombian establishments and households. Rudolph earned his B.A. in Economics and Information Systems with First Class Honors from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2022, where he was featured in a promotional video for his program. At WashU, his research has been supported by the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy.
Ruilin Lai is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in Political Science at Washington University. Substantively, his research centers on authoritarian politics, with particular attention to the judiciary’s role in facilitating repression and the downstream effects of such practices on citizens’ political attitudes and behaviors. He also examines media capture and media bias in democratic settings. Lai completed both his undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Hong Kong. His work has been supported by the Institute for Humane Studies and published in the British Journal of Political Science, Political Science Research and Methods, International Studies Quarterly, and the Review of International Political Economy.
Khoi Ngo is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Sociology at Washington University. His research is guided by fundamental questions about the degree to which certain groups are systematically disadvantaged by institutions of social control and how said groups internalize or subvert such marginalization. In his work, he primarily uses survey, experimental, and computational methods as well as large datasets to study criminal justice; however, he maintains a keen interest in developing a rigorous mixed-method research agenda. In his current major project, he challenges the commonly presumed value-neutrality of administrative records produced by law enforcement and institutions alike by analyzing 3+ million traffic stops and millions of voter records. Khoi completed his B.A. in Political Science in 2023 at New York University Abu Dhabi, graduating as a University Honors Scholar. His work has received institutional and financial support from Washington University's Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, & Equity and Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, & Public Policy and from NYU's Office of Inclusion & Diversity and Center for Technological & Economic Development.