Two Graduate Students Win Top Awards for ICPSR

Alison Craig,  a first year grad student studying American Politics, and Marina Duque, a third year student studying International Relations were recipients of two excellent scholarships to attend the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan this summer.

Alison Craig is the first person in our department to win the ICPSR scholarship to attend the 2013 summer program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research. The scholarship is intended to encourage women graduate students to attend the ICPSR Summer Program and waives the Program Scholar's fee to attend one or both of the ICPSR Summer Program's four-week sessions. The scholarship was awarded to only three women graduate students in Ph.D. programs worldwide.

Alison spent the four weeks at ICPSR building on the methodological training she gained in her first year at OSU by taking courses in Applied Bayesian Modeling for the Social Sciences and Game Theory.  In the Bayesian course, she studied the application of Bayesian methods to a variety of standard statistical models and the advantages of Bayesian models, particularly in dealing with missing data and multilevel models.  The Game Theory course provided an introduction to formal modeling that will be particularly applicable to Alison’s work as a legislative politics scholar.

Marina Duque received the John A. Garcia award for 2013.  This award is designed to encourage outstanding women and minorities to attend ICPSR and pays for the program fees associated with attending.  She will attend the summer program to learn cutting-edge techniques of social network analysis. She studies status in international politics, and will use social network analysis to identify the international status order emerging from states’ practices. This approach is unprecedented in the field of IR, and constitutes a departure from traditional approaches that measure status by looking at the distribution of material resources among states. 

In addition to her scholarship to ICPSR, Duque was the recipient of a fellowship to attend the Polnet 2013 Annual Meeting.

Congratulations to Alison and Marina!