Weidenbaum Center Invests $135,000 to Advance Graduate Research in Policy-Relevant Fields

The Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy has awarded a total of $135,000 to support four exceptional PhD students in Political Science, Economics, and Sociology through the 2025–2026 Weidenbaum Graduate Fellowship. The fellows were selected by a jury of three 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 in developing the vision for this fellowship and helping bring it to life. His commitment to graduate education and interdisciplinary scholarship made this possible.”

“We’re excited to support students whose work is shaping conversations in both policy and scholarship,” added Elizabeth Pippert Larson, Associate Director of Research & Administration.

The Weidenbaum Center also gratefully acknowledges the support and partnership of Vice Dean of Research Deanna Barch and Vice Dean of Graduate Education Sophia E. Hayes. Their commitment to strengthening graduate education and interdisciplinary research in Arts & Sciences has been instrumental to launching this fellowship program.

Alex Avery is a fifth-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 fourth-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 fourth-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 third-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.