Chief Evaluation Office Summer Fellowship Program
The Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) hosts a summer fellowship program for current and recent Ph.D. candidates to gain skills evaluating federal labor policies, protections and programs. CEO Summer Fellows will have the opportunity to gain valuable experience, get exposure to the Department of Labor’s agencies, and complete and present a research project on a topic relevant to their dissertation. Fellows work with the Evaluation & Research or Data Analytics teams within the Chief Evaluation Office, learning from evaluation experts and supporting research activities.
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Fellow | Testimonial |
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Hannah Farkas is a Ph.D. student in the Sustainable Development program at Columbia University. Her research is in environmental economics, with a focus on how climate change and extreme weather events impact labor markets, consumer credit, and economic inequality, and how policies relating to natural disaster management can mitigate these effects. |
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Lucas Greer is a Ph.D. candidate in policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and an assistant policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. His research interests include education policy, educational technology, postsecondary education, and labor economics. His current research focuses on the labor market outcomes of online postsecondary education. |
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Mary Milnamow is a Ph.D. student at the University at Buffalo School of Social Work, where she is a Schomburg Fellow. Her research focuses on employment stability and the economic well-being of working family caregivers for older adults with a disability. She is conducting secondary data analysis applying an intersectionality lens to assess the relationship between flexible hours and work productivity. |
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Oyinkansola Sodiya is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Management at the University of Texas at Arlington. Her research focuses on exploring the receptiveness of technology augmentation in the workplace, with an emphasis on Artificial Intelligence augmentation and Robotics Process Automation augmentation. She was honored with the 2024 Dwight David Eisenhower Achievement Award from the United States Department of Transportation. |
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Tyler Q. Welch is a Ph.D. candidate in the Risk & Insurance department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Wisconsin School of Business. Tyler is a Graduate Research Fellow at the Institute for Research on Poverty and an associate member of the National Academy of Social Insurance. His research focuses on how individuals interact with insurance markets, particularly on the topics of social insurance, health, longevity, and public policy. |
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Fellow | Testimonial |
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Suchitra Akmanchi is a Ph.D. candidate in the economics program at the University of Virginia, where she is also an IES pre-doctoral fellow. Her research focuses on student success in postsecondary education, with an emphasis on community college. |
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Kathryn Blanchard is a Ph.D. candidate in the economics program at George Washington University. Her research interests are in the economics of education and how education policy can improve student outcomes, with particular focus on labor market outcomes. |
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Jack Chapel is a Ph.D. candidate in the economics program at the University of Southern California. He is an applied microeconomist studying topics in health and labor economics. His current research projects focus on (1) estimating the impact of chronic diseases on the labor force status of older workers; (2) evaluating how geographically distant social networks influence local public benefit take-up; and (3) projecting future disparities in the health and economic well-being of Americans nearing retirement. |
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Fellow | Testimonial |
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Sarah Bainn is a Ph.D. candidate in the economics program at North Carolina State University. She conducts research in labor, education, and health economics. Her long-term goal is to pursue research that seeks to understand the labor market and healthcare delivery challenges that beset countries. |
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Layla Darougar is a Ph.D. candidate in the economics program at the University at Albany, SUNY, and her research interests lie in the field of labor economics. Her main research focus is on the impact of the Great Recession on labor market outcomes and workers’ well-being. Specifically, she is investigating the effects of employer provided benefits on wages, and how the Great Recession impacts the effect of each benefit on wages. |
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Nathaniel Flemming is a Ph.D. candidate in the political science and social data analytics programs at Penn State University. His current research focuses on metropolitan fragmentation and its relationship to inequality. |
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Fellow | Testimonial |
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Evan Murphy is a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Nevada, Reno’s Interdisciplinary Social Psychology program with interests in decision making, policy, and program evaluation research. He is a trained social psychologist with a background in applied research, and he has experience, knowledge, and skills in policy and program evaluation research. |
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Evgenia Kapousouz is a Ph.D. candidate in Survey Methodology at the Department of Public Administration at the University of Illinois Chicago. She is primarily interested in measurement error and cross-cultural analysis. Her dissertation examines social desirability bias as a questionnaire, personality, and cultural trait and whether it is associated with other response styles, i.e., acquiescence and extreme response style. |
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Kendal Lowery is a Ph.D. candidate in the departments of Sociology and Demography at the Pennsylvania State University, where she is also an NIH T-32 trainee in Social Environments and Population Health. Her research is broadly focused on immigrants, their health, and their integration into the U.S. society. Currently, she is focusing on the intergenerational mobility and well-being of immigrants through observing different indicators of socioeconomic status. |
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Fellow | Testimonial |
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Meifeng Yang is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include labor, demography, education, and public finance. Prior to her Ph.D. program, she worked as a research analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. She earned her bachelor's degree in economics from UC Berkeley. |
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Wenchen Wang is a Ph.D. candidate at Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. Her experience is diverse: she was a data and policy analyst at the licensing and background studies divisions of the Office of the Inspector General in the Minnesota Department of Human Services; she worked with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis to evaluate the economic effects of Humphrey-Hawkins Act, and she used to be a professional interpreter for a local government in China. At present, Wenchen’s research focus is on labor economics, to be more specific, how occupational licensing affects the labor market outcomes including wages, hours worked as well as employment. |
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Xue Wu is a Ph.D. candidate from the Department of Economics University at Albany, SUNY with an interest in health economics, industrial organization, development economics, and applied econometrics. The majority of her current research applies PSM-DID experiments to estimate the effect of losing access to hospital-based obstetric care in rural U.S. and the magnitudes of policy-relevant factors affecting rural mothers’ health outcomes. |
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