Undergrads Helped Projects Thrive in 2022

The Center’s multi-year projects and programs help advance our ways of thinking and understanding thanks in part to the contributions of Stanford University’s extraordinary students. CASBS started employing the talents of undergraduate research assistants in a concerted way starting in summer 2019.

Many undergrad RAs have gained this experience with CASBS through Stanford’s Summer Research College, a program administered through several departments and units on campus. Students apply and rank their preferred project appointments among those listed on the SRC site. For a ten-week period and a stipend, selected students work with a faculty member and engage in some aspect of that faculty member’s research project. Other students respond to direct calls that CASBS program directors distribute directly to various campus departments.

In summer 2022, several undergrad RAs seized opportunities to work with CASBS. We asked three of them to characterize their experience in their own words.

Andrew Li

“Last summer, I worked under CASBS program director Quinn Waeiss with the Causal Inference for Social Impact Lab (CISIL). CISIL launched a Data Challenge in February 2022, bringing together over 30 teams of researchers to conduct policy evaluations and apply causal inference methods on the same set of policy questions using the same set of administrative data from King County Metro (King County, WA, including the Seattle metro area). As part of the lab, I worked directly with the analytical code files submitted by the teams of researchers as part of the Data Challenge, ensuring the reproducibility of the teams' analyses with their code and writing documentation for their submitted code files. I also worked with Quinn and other members of the CISIL team — Michelle Fu and Lucie Lu — to develop a 

protocol for categorizing the research decisions made by the teams, building a dataset documenting how the researchers interacted with, cleaned, and modeled King Country Metro data and the subsequent impacts on their results (in other words, how research decisions impacted causal inference in their analysis). Through my work, I hope to have helped lay the groundwork for future work conducted by CISIL, contributing to the growing conversation on how we can improve evidence-based policymaking through government and academic cooperation, just like what we're seeing now with the Data Challenge. On a personal level, I hope to continue the type of research that I began during my summer with CISIL, utilizing data and computation to augment human capability to provide for the public good.”

Andrew Li '25 is an undergraduate interested in studying computer science on the artificial intelligence track.
 

Michelle Fu

“In the summer of 2022, I worked as a research assistant for CASBS's Causal Inference for Social Impact Lab (CISIL) under the guidance of CASBS program director Quinn Waeiss. CISIL administered a data challenge to researchers in the months preceding my RAship, and my job was to review the submissions and analyze them for any trends. In particular, we looked at how the researchers 

chose to operationalize their variables, how they chose to clean and group the raw data, and the functions that they chose for their analysis. Throughout this experience, I learned a lot about data analysis and the various techniques that are used to determine causal relationships for evidence-based policy. I hope that my contributions helped illuminate the ways that researchers' analytic decisions affect their causal inferences and guide effective communication between researchers and policymakers in an age of evidence-based policy.”

Michelle Fu is a junior majoring in Computer Science.

 

Ciara Locker

“Within the ongoing Creating a New Moral Political Economy program and with the guidance of CASBS program director Zack Ugolnik, I worked on various projects, including exploring how economics pedagogy could be improved to shape the next generation of economists for the better. I was most excited to contribute to a collaboration between the program and Honor Ed, an educational start-up, to create a new economics course for resource-deprived educational institutions. Most of my time was spent developing a data set of potential collaborators at U.S. Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs). As someone of Tsalagi (Cherokee) descent, I was thrilled to help expand the project’s impact by pursuing connections with Indigenous scholars across the country. If we hope to renew our political economy towards 

innovation and resilience, we must turn to Indigenous wisdom and models. For example, the Cherokee Nation has built impressive authority over its domestic political economy despite persistent attempts by the state to undermine its sovereignty as a people. Furthering my learning about neoliberalism —the framework the program hopes to replace — and Indigenous philosophies solidified my ambitions of pursuing graduate school and researching how markets and their underlying ideologies affect how we think about the concept of health.”

Ciara Locker ‘23 is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and is a senior studying international relations and minoring in human biology. They plan to pursue graduate studies in medical anthropology.