Q&A with King Center Predoctoral Research Fellow Besindone Dumi-Leslie
Besindone Dumi-Leslie was a predoctoral research fellow at the King Center from 2022 to 2024. Her research interests include education, urbanization, and political institutions in Africa. She is currently a predoctoral research fellow at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.
Tell us about yourself and your background. What drew you to apply for the Predoctoral Research Fellows Program at the King Center?
I earned my undergraduate degree in economics at the University of Alberta. Given my interest in development economics, the King Center's predoc program was recommended to me on several occasions. I did not have much formal exposure to development economics and the program seemed like a great opportunity to get more exposure to the field and refine my research interests while also learning about what an academic career could entail.
Which King Center initiative did you work on and what global development challenge is it aiming to tackle? What was your role on the team?
During my time at the King Center, I worked with Pascaline Dupas on diverse projects encompassing health, gender equity, institutions, and many other areas. I was involved in various stages of the projects but my primary contributions were data preparation, analysis, and presentation.
What did you learn from working on a research team with faculty members, graduate students, and other researchers?
I learned that there are so many different ways to be a researcher. I had the opportunity to observe how researchers with different academic backgrounds, personalities, and levels of expertise approached problems and what they considered important. This has been invaluable in exploring where I stand on issues and what works for me in my current research interests.
How would you describe the research community at the King Center and Stanford? How did you connect with other predocs and researchers on campus either through your research projects or outside of them?
By attending the King Center’s graduate student and visiting faculty presentations, predocs are able to share reflections on the presentations and discuss outstanding questions. And with the broader research community coming together through King Center events, we get to see what researchers from different intellectual backgrounds (both within and outside of economics) consider important. Additionally, I found the predoc research lunches, where we present the projects we work on, very valuable. By sharing an office space with other predocs, you learn a lot of the smaller details about what others are working on, as well as the challenges and frustrations they face doing their work . We often shared our experiences bridging the gap between those intricacies and the big picture.
What advice would you give for incoming predocs to the King Center or others beginning predoctoral fellowships?
I would tell them that there’s as much value in having conversations with others in the community, as there is in the experiences that you can put on your CV. I would also remind them that they should keep learning about applied research in the wider world, not just from economics papers.
What are your goals and ambitions for whatever’s next in your journey? How did participating in this fellowship program inform your future plans?
As part of my time at the King Center, I was involved in various field experiments and RCTs and I spent some time in the field for one. It was incredibly valuable to see how the research we do plays out in the real world and impacts people’s lives. Because of these experiences, I’ve decided to spend the next year focusing on field research before I go to graduate school.