Research Interrupted: What's Possible Now

The King Center hosted a virtual conversation for graduate students working on global development to hear from faculty who have gotten or are working on getting field work back up and running during the pandemic, and to discuss future directions and what is feasible now and in the near future.

The panel shared their experiences with work that they have ongoing, as well as strategies for getting research approvals and moving forward that might be of use for grad students interested in conducting field work.

The panel includes:

• Pascaline Dupas, King Center Faculty Director and Professor of Economics,
• Stephen Luby, Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases), School of Medicine and
• Soledad Prillaman, Assistant Professor of Political Science

Admission: Current Stanford students only.

About the speakers:

Pascaline Dupas is the King Center faculty director and a professor of economics at Stanford University. She is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI). Dupas is a development economist whose research seeks to identify interventions and polices that can help reduce global poverty. Her ongoing research include studies of education policy in Ghana, family planning policy in Burkina Faso, digital credit regulation in Malawi, and government subsidized health insurance in India. 

Dupas is on the executive committee of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL), on the board of directors of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), and a research associate at the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER). She is a fellow of the Econometric Society and was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow. Dupas studied philosophy and economics as an undergraduate student at the Ecole Normale Superieure (Ulm) in Paris, France. She obtained a PhD in economics from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris, France) in 2006.

Stephen Luby studied philosophy and earned a BA summa cum laude from Creighton University. He earned his medical degree from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas and completed his residency in internal medicine at the University of Rochester-Strong Memorial Hospital. He studied epidemiology and preventive medicine at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Luby's previous positions include directing the Centre for Communicable Diseases at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Diseases Research, Bangladesh in Dhaka, Bangladesh from 2004 - 2012, conducting research and teaching epidemiology at the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan from 1993 - 1998, and working as an epidemiologist in the Foodborne and Diarrheal Diseases Branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Soledad Artiz Prillaman is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University. She received a PhD in government at Harvard University in 2017 and a BA in political science and economics from Texas A&M University in 2011.

Her research lies at the intersections of comparative political economy, development, and gender, with a focus in South Asia. She is motivated by questions such as: What are the political consequences of development and development policies, particularly for women’s political behavior? How are minorities, specifically women, democratically represented and where do inequalities in political engagement persist and how are voter demands translated into policy and governance? In answering these questions, she utilizes mixed methods, including field experiments, primary surveys, and in-depth qualitative fieldwork to identify empirical relationships as well as the underlying causal mechanisms.

Her book project seeks to better understand why women in India are particularly disengaged from politics and to identify the mechanisms through which the prevailing gender gap in political participation is reduced. In doing so, she evaluates the mechanisms by which the state is strengthened through increased political integration of women in India by detailing the oft-unconsidered consequences of development interventions for political behavior and local politics. Additionally her book project evaluates how women who have become active political agents organize politically and are received and resisted by traditional political networks.