From Fieldwork to Policy Insight: Yale’s ISPS Fellowship Expands Graduate Research Across Disciplines

Adriana Cerón arrived in El Salvador in February of last year to study the lives of Salvadorans after deportation from the United States. She quickly realized she would need more time to complete the work.

As a graduate policy fellow with the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Cerón obtained support to continue collecting the data for her dissertation, exploring how deportation shapes the lives of migrants beyond the U.S. border.

“I would not have been able to complete my field work if I had not received ISPS research support earlier in the year,” she said. “When conducting international research, you can’t simply leave the field and come back next week. Just because of how expensive it is.”

Through a combination of stipend support and research funding, the ISPS Graduate Policy Fellowship allows graduate students to spend a full year developing projects that speak to urgent policy debates. The program emphasizes translating research into usable insights, and past fellows have emerged with substantial written work — from dissertation material to publishable academic articles.

“This program offers our fellows a unique opportunity to delve more deeply into their field of research while gaining insight into other fields and other research methods,” said Gregory Huber, interim director of ISPS, Forst Family Professor of Political Science, and director of the Center for the Study of American Politics. “It’s a pleasure to see them developing their policy-oriented skills and a wider outlook on the types of questions than can fuel data-based policy debates.”

This year’s fellows span political science, sociology, psychology, cellular & molecular physiology, American studies, and law. They have evaluated non-police crisis response programs, traced the origins of modern venture capital and its effects on technology design, examined how anti-trans legislation has affected the mental health of trans adolescents, and much more.

“It’s so cool that there’s a space on campus that breaks down some of those walls between disciplines,” said Adora Svitak, the fellowship’s coordinator, a former fellow, and a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in the joint program in sociology and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.

Svitak said that graduate school can often feel “monastic,” with students often confined to their departments. The ISPS Graduate Policy Fellowship combats that isolation by motivating students to interact with their peers who study different subjects and often use different methods.

“It’s great to have conversations with others and to see your work as part of a bigger tapestry instead of just this one mountain you’re trying to climb on your own,” she said. “Here, we’re all on the same team.”

Svitak shared her enthusiasm for how the current fellows bring their fieldwork and lived experiences into the room, whether an anthropological immersion in Silicon Valley or interviews with deported migrants in El Salvador.

“These scholars take us there through their research and allow their peers to understand places they might not otherwise visit,” she said. “The exposure has opened my eyes to the conversations we need to have across many domains.”

Cerón’s work involved 56 in-depth interviews with deported adults; additional interviews with NGO workers and health practitioners; and three research trips. She chronicled the cascading harms — from health deterioration and family separation to financial crises — shaping migrants’ ability to rebuild their lives in already precarious contexts.

“I’m asking, ‘What happens to people after they are deported, and why don’t we really talk about their experiences after?’” Cerón said. “Too often deportation is painted as the end of the story. But it’s never the end. It’s just another phase. It extends.”

When applications re-open in the fall, Svitak encourages students to avoid “scaring themselves out of applying” to the program.

“Students can think that they need to have everything figured out,” she said. “But they should not feel like their work needs to be a final draft. This is a space for constructive criticism. For feedback. For iterating.”

In addition, she praised the selection process for openness and inclusivity, not as a way to reinforce the status of students who have already proven themselves.

“I felt it was like, oh, we see you as somebody who can be helped,” she said. “And who can be a good member of this community.”