Undergraduate Dahl Scholar

Katharine Berman

Dahl Scholar, 2018 - 2019

As a Dahl Scholar, Katharine Berman works with Assistant Professor of Political Science Kate Balwin on the influence of religion on climate policy debates. Kat is a political science major in the Yale Class 2020. Her independent project asks “under what conditions do religious organizations advocate for the environment?” and she hopes to address how different theologies and different environmental or geographic differences connect to environmental advocacy.

Rachel Diaz

Dahl Scholar, 2019 - 2020

Rachel Diaz is currently conducting research with Zack Cooper, the director of Health Policy at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies. Her research mainly focuses on claims analysis in the ambulance services industry to determine how ambulance provider ownership impacts billing practices and provider behavior. Rachel hopes to offer a window into the pricing of sectors with inelastic demand, and seeks to better understand whether market forces are applicable to a sector as quintessential as the U.S. ambulance industry.

William McGrew

Dahl Scholar, 2015 - 2016

As a Dahl Scholar, Will McGrew helped ISPS Director Jacob Hacker with the research, sourcing, and editing for his book American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper. He also completed an independent research project on the effects of social segregation by gender in American colleges on intergroup biases, rates of sexual violence on campus, and professional disparities after graduation.

Sarah Merchant

Dahl Scholar, 2016 - 2017

As a Dahl Scholar, Sarah Merchant worked with ISPS Director Jacob Hacker and built off of the research she did for her thesis where she studied the Black-white wealth gap in the US over time and looked at how the gap was affected by the 2008 housing crisis. She then extended this national analysis to the state-level by looking at the racial differences in foreclosures in Connecticut and describing the role of racial differences in high-cost loans in creating racial disparities in foreclosures.

Margaret Moor

Dahl Scholar, 2017 - 2018

As a Dahl Scholar, Maggie Moor worked with Professor Alexander Coppock on a meta-analysis of the list experiment survey method. Their work is in the process of being published (link to most recent draft here).

Currently, Maggie is an Associate Consultant at Bain & Company in New York City. She graduated Yale in 2018 with a B.A. in Global Affairs.

Maxime Pradier

Dahl Scholar, 2017 - 2018

As a Dahl Scholar, Maxime Pradier’s project aimed at determining whether local economic contexts have an impact on the local enrollment rate of a federal assistance program seeking to support unemployed disabled people.

Currently, Maxime is working on his senior thesis: he is hoping to find out whether prosecutors in Louisiana are justified in thinking that seeking the death penalty rather than a life-without-parole sentence in first degree murder cases enhances prosecutorial success.

Akhil Rajan

Dahl Scholar, 2018 - 2019

As a Dahl Scholar, Akhil Rajan works with Assistant Professor of Political Science Fredrik Savje on a project developing an institutional design for fair redistricting. Akhil is studying Ethics, Politics and Economics and is in the Yale class of 2021. He is also a Human Rights Scholar at Yale Law School’s Schell Center. He is interested in empirical democratic theory, especially applications in redistricting and voting behavior.

Baji Tumendemberel

Dahl Scholar, 2019 - 2020

Baji’s project as a Dahl Scholar will focus on the implications of prison privatization. More specifically, he will conduct a review of contracts made between private prison contractors and state governments in order to see the legal framework of liability and responsibility that is drawn up between the state and the free market. Through this analysis, he hopes to uncover some insight into why private prisons consistently lead to worse outcomes for inmates.

Benjamin Waldman

Dahl Scholar, 2017-2018

As a Dahl Scholar, Benjamin Waldman worked under the guidance of Professor Stephen Skowronek, investigating the theoretical and institutional construction of the administrative state during the New Deal. His research was mainly archival, conducted at Harvard University and the University of Chicago.

Liana Wang

Dahl Scholar, 2019 - 2020

Liana Wang is conducting research with the advising of Professor of Economics Costas Meghir on how the U.S. tax and welfare system affects income inequality on a national scale. Her project focuses on how measures of inequality shift by imputing national and state taxes and transfers using data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey from 1977 to the present. Liana is a senior majoring in Economics and a member of the Multidisciplinary Academic Program in Human Rights at Yale Law School.