The C-SoDA Accelerator Award Seed Grant is open for applications. Please see the guidelines and instructions for applying. The deadline to submit your application is October 15, 2025.
2024 Seed Grant Winners
Daniel Tavana, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Title: “Elite politics and legislative behavior in the Kuwait National Assembly”
Liying Luo, Associate Professor of Sociology/ Xiao Liu, Associate Professor, Biomedical Engineering/ Cayley Ryan-Claytor, Ph.D. student, Sociology/ Xufu Liu, Ph.D. student, Biomedical Engineering/ Yutong Mao, Ph.D. student, Biomedical Engineering/ Jiahui Xu, Ph.D. student, Sociology and Demography
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Youzhen Su, Ph.D. student, Communications and Psychology/ Chenyang (Sara) He, Ph.D. student, Psychology
Title: “Empowering Bystanders and Technology to Combat Cyberbullying: A Social Influence Approach”
Bumba Mukherjee, Professor of Political Science/ Vineeta Yadav, Professor of Political Science/ Songtao Duan, Ph.D. student, Political Science/ Khoi Nguyen Huynh, Ph.D. student, Political Science
Title: “Deep Causal Learning and Estimation of Treatment Effects in Target Populations in Social Media Platforms”
Yang Yang, Ph.D. student, Political Science/ Yang Song, Ph.D. student, Political Science
Title: “Partisan Sorting of Electoral Participation: The Effect of Partisan Mismatch on Voter Turnout”
Jungsik Choi, Ph.D. student, Sociology
Title: “Analyzing the Cultural Representation of Nation-States through Word Embedding”
Joseph Risi, Ph.D. student, Criminology/ Ashley Rodriguez, Ph.D. student, Criminology
Title: “Who’s On Your Case? An Examination of Pennsylvania Courtroom Workgroups”
Bing Pan, Professor of Commercial Recreation and Tourism/ Lijiang Shen, Associate Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences/ Yaqi Gong, Ph.D. student, Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management
Title: “You risk, I risk: Effects of social media on risk-taking travel behavior”
Jennifer Isasi, Assistant Research Professor of Digital Scholarship/ Michael Anesko, Professor of English and American Studies/ Kevin Conaway, Director of the Office of Digital Pedagogies and Initiatives
Title: “Database of American Authorship, 1860-1920”
Daiqing Zhao, Ph.D. student, Psychology/ Chenyang (Sara) He, Ph.D. student, Psychology/ Xiaoyue Xiong, Human Development and Family Studies
Title: “The Development of Self-regulation from Early to Late Childhood: An Integrated Investigation of Genetic, Neural, and Environmental Mechanisms”
Bronwen Powell, Assistant Professor of Geography, African Studies, and Anthropology Anne Pisor, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Demography / Mary Shenk, Professor of Anthropology, Demography, and Asian Studies/ Brian Thiede, Associate Professor, Agricultural Economics, Sociology and Education /Nafi Mohammad Ali, Ph.D. student, Anthropology / Demography/ Joon Hwang, Ph.D. student, Anthropology
Title: “The effects of climate-induced livelihood transitions and relocations on children’s nutritional status in Chakaria, Bangladesh”
2023 Seed Grant Winners
Tianyi Zhang, PHD student, Department of Psychology/ Chenyang (Sara) He, PHD student, Department of Psychology
Title: “From Campaign Trail to Corporate Halls: Unraveling the Impact of Hillary Clinton’s Bid on Female Leadership in Fortune 500 Companies”
Yining Feng, PHD student, Department of Rural Sociology and Demography
Title: “Post-Hurricane Katrina Return Migration Decision-Making: A Big-Data Analytical Approach with Infutor Data”
Yubai Yuan, Assistant Professor of Statistics/ Abdul Basit Adeel, PHD student, Sociology and Social Data Analytics
Title: “Social Influence Learning on Complex Network”
Nicole Kreisberg, Assistant Professor in Public Policy and Sociology
Title: “Reskilling for the Future of Work”
Joseph Guerriero, PHD student, Department of Psychology
Title: “Thinking ahead to do better now: Legacy-focused cognition and its link to environmental sustainability.”
Davide Puts, Professor of Anthropology
Title: “Is there a human estrus? Characterizing cyclic shifts in women’s observable and behavioral phenotypes”
Lingbo Zhao, PHD student, Department of Political Science
Title: “A Natural Language Processing Approach to Analyze Corporate Perspectives on Economic Sanctions”
Yaqi Gong, PHD student, Department of Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management
Title: “Using Topic Modelling and Qualitative Inquiry to Understand Smartwatch Usage in Outdoor Recreation Activities”
Cheyang He, PHD student, Department of Psychology
Title: “Unpacking Discourse on Period Poverty: An NLP Analysis of US Non-Profit Organizations’ Facebook Communications”
Giancarlo Visconti, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Title: “Unrealistic comparisons: Why forced-choice conjoint experiments fail to mimic electoral decisions under voluntary voting”
2022 Seed Grant Winners
Xun Cao, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy
Title: “How Does Public Opinion Affect Climate Change Policies? Constructing Measures of Climate Change Public Concern and Testing Their Effects on Climate Policy Outputs”
Colby Parkinson, PHD student, Department of Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management/ Bing Pan, Professor of Recreation, Park, and Tourism Management/ Guangqing Chi, Associate Professor of Rural Sociology and Demography
Title: “Expanding Methods and Understanding of Trail Use and Users at Grand Canyon National Park with Spatial Applications of Big Data”
Sarah Rajtmajer, Assistant Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology/ Kevin Munger, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Social Data Analytics/ Xinyu (Ginny) Wang, PHD student, Infomatics and Social Data Analytics
Title: “Assessing the disparities between public and private attitudes towards misinformation”
Sojung Baek, PHD student, Department of Anthropology
Title: “Empathic signaling and social capital among women with labor migrant husbands in Bangladesh”
John Yen, Professor of Data Science
Title: “AI-enabled Cyber Threats Linking Using NLP”
Nitheesha Nakka, PHD student, Department of Political Science and Social Data Analytics
Title: “Race, Gender, and Digital Politics: Examining Subnational Political Elites on Twitter”
Eric Plutzer, Professor of Political Science/ Michael Berkman, Professor of Political Science/ Michael Burnham, PHD student, Department of Political Science
Title: “Word embedding and document classification models to measure political culture in the United States, 1870 – 2022”
Haoyang Zhang, PHD student, Department of Sociology
Title: “The Effect of Nonnormative School Transitions on Adolescents’ Social Networks and Educational Performance”
Isaac Pollert, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Social Data Analytics/ Hilary Wething, Assistant Professor of Public Policy/Johabed Olvera Esquivel, Assistant Professor of Public Policy
Title: “Improving Maternal and Child Health of Working Families: The Role of Social Policy Design”
2021 Seed Grant Winners
Michael Burnham, Ph.D. student, Department of Political Science/ Kayla Kahn, Ph.D. student, Department of Political Science/ Rachel Peng, Ph.D. student, Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications/ Jeremy Seeman, Ph.D. student, Department of Statistics/ Christopher Seto, Ph.D. student, Department of Sociology and Criminology/ Ryan Wang, Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications
Title: “Big Data as a window into psychological traits: Investigating the link between risk perception, psychological traits and mitigating behavior”
Hanyi Min (Haylee), Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology
Title: “There is no vaccine for racism: Investigating the relationship between online discrimination and mental health”
Liying Luo, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Demography, Associate Director, Center for Social Data Analytics
Title: “Heterogeneous Effects of Education on Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia among Demographic Groups: A Multigenerational and Multilevel Study”
Yun Liang, Ph.D. Student, Recreation, Parks & Tourism Management/Bing Pan, Professor, Recreation, Park and Tourism Management /Guangqing Chi, Professor of Rural Sociology, Demography and Public Health Sciences
Title: “Who visits Yellowstone National Park during the COVID-19 pandemic? A gravity model analysis by mobile device data”
2020 Seed Grant Winners
Dongwon Lee, Professor, College of Information Sciences and Technology and Aiping Xiong, Assistant Professor, Information Sciences & Technology
Title: “The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde:Analysis of r/ToastMe and r/RoastMe in Reddit”
Claire Kelling, Ph.D. student, Statistics and Brittany Freelin, Department of Sociology and Criminology, Ph.D. student
Title: “Collection and Analysis of Open Data for Policing”
Kenneth Huang, Assistant Professor, College of Information Sciences and Technology/ Saeed Abdullah, Assistant Professor, College of Information Sciences and Technology
Title: “Using Social Media to Assess and Support Mental Wellbeing of Essential Workers”
Michael Lin, Ph.D. student, Department of Computer Science and Engineering/ Amit Sharma, Professor of Hospitality Management/ Bing Pan, Professor, Recreation, Park and Tourism Management
Title: “How restaurants recover from the pandemic? Evidence from mobile traffic data”
Raphael Rodriguez, Ph.D. student, College of IST
Topic: proposal is to jumpstart my dissertation work, which investigates the impacts of US courts on voter participation, and the financial consequences of voter turnout.
Sam Bestvater, Ph.D. student, Department of Political Science
Title: “Protest and Repression in the Internet Age”
Sayali Phadke, Ph.D. student, Statistics
Title: “Developing a Statistically Literate Citizen, subtitle Does Teaching Through Relevant Context Improve Statistical Literacy Outcomes?”
Bu Zhong, Professor at the Bellisario College of Communications and Suhang Wang, Assistant Professor, College of Information Sciences and Technology
Title: “Combating health misinformation in patients with health disparities”
Bernice L. Hausman, Professor and Chair, Department of Humanities/ Prasenjit Mitra, Professor, College of Information Sciences and Technology/ Shreya Ghosh, Postdoctoral Fellow, College of Information Sciences and Technology
Title: “Analyzing Public Comments to Detect Changes of Public Sentiment related to Vaccines”
Sang Yeon Kim, Ph.D. student, Department of Political Science
Title: “The Political Influence of Non-Politicized Friends: Experimental approach on social network effects of protest information diffusion in Twitter”