Spring 2023 Small Grants Recipients

Anaïs Voşki is a quadrilingual PhD student in Environment & Resources (E-IPER) at Stanford University. Building on her prior work with the overview effect and astronauts’ pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors, her doctoral research in environmental psychology centers on the affective and behavioral sciences nexus from an interdisciplinary planetary perspective. Her current research explores ecological emotions, i.e. eco-emotions, choice architecture designs for sustainable diets and lifestyles, and virtual reality (VR) applications for pro-environmental affective and behavioral interventions.

Nicholas Lyon

Nicholas Lyon is a PhD candidate in political science at Stanford University. His research focuses on ethnic politics, social change, and the political consequences of urbanization. In his dissertation, he studies the differential implications of Africa’s urban transition for interethnic relations and political mobilization across different sizes of urban locations. He holds a B.A. degree in Economics and Political Science from Columbia University and an M.Sc. degree in African Development from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Poornima Rajeshwar is currently pursuing a PhD in anthropology. Rajeshwar’s areas of research include anthropology of law, police, labor, gender, violence and South Asia. She has over 8 years of experience in legal and criminal justice policies in India and the U.S. and has held research positions at UCLA School of Law and National Law University Delhi. She holds a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School.

Rubén González, proudly from Greenfield, California, is a PhD candidate in the Race, Inequality, and Language in Education (RILE) program at Stanford University, where he is also earning a Master’s of Arts degree in sociology. His dissertation research explores how students and teachers of color develop and operationalize an abolitionist praxis in various educational settings.Prior to pursuing his graduate studies, Rubén was a high school English, English Language Development, and AVID teacher in Sacramento, California. He also worked with (im)migrant and multilingual Latinx youth as an academic tutor in classroom and after-school settings in Dixon, California, during his undergraduate studies. He completed his Bachelor’s degree in English at Sacramento State University after transferring from Hartnell College. At the statewide level, Rubén serves on the Education Trust–West’s (ETW) Educator Advisory Council (EAC). In local community settings, Rubén has organized with the Association of Raza Educators (ARE) Sacramento, and Ethnic Studies Now (ESN) Sacramento and Elk Grove.

Thomas Cao is a PhD candidate in political economics at Stanford GSB. His main substantive research interests relate to the impacts of information on political attitudes and behaviors, the political economy and regulation of the information technology industry, and political polarization and animosity. Methodologically, he is interested in causal inference, especially on issues facing survey experiments.

Ross Dahlke is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. His work uses computational methods and large-scale field experiments to examine how a dynamic information ecosystem shapes individuals’ beliefs and actions. Before graduate school, Ross was a Data Scientist in the marketing measurement industry, working with clients such as Facebook Marketplace, Calvin Klein, UnitedHealthcare, Disney, and Coach Bags. Ross also has consulted for over 50 political campaigns.