Prize Winners

2025 prize winners

• Alyssa Heinze

  PhD candidate in Political Science, University of California, Berkeley
  Studies gendered understandings of the political economy of local development, political inequality, and the consequences of climate change, with a focus on India. Her dissertation investigates how control of water resources has changed intra-household gender relations in rural India. The prize supports a well-powered survey on women’s representation in local natural resource institutions.

• Xiaoxia Huang

  PhD candidate in Political Science, Syracuse University
  Studies gender and bureaucracy in China. Using original data on bureaucratic hiring, her work examines gendered recruitment and advancement in the public sector and how institutional norms shape women’s career trajectories. The prize funds fieldwork.

• Colette Marcellin

  PhD candidate in Political Science, Vanderbilt University
  Studies political behavior, social movements, and public opinion in the US with a focus on gender, racial, and ethnic politics. Her dissertation examines women’s political behavior and group consciousness in the 2017 Women’s March and the #MeToo movement. The prize funds a survey experiment.

• Francesco Raffaelli

  PhD candidate in Politics, University of Oxford
  Studies political behavior and comparative politics in Western Europe. His current project examines the politicization of emerging issues including gender identity, gender-inclusive language, gender-affirmative care, affirmative action, and school curricula. The prize funds original survey data collection.

• Alejandra López Villegas

  PhD candidate in Political Science, Michigan State University
  Studies the intersection of democratic backsliding and women’s rights in Latin America, with a focus on countries governed by left-wing parties. Her comparative analysis of Brazil and Mexico examines how left-wing incumbents use women’s rights strategically to consolidate power. The prize supports fieldwork in El Salvador.

Honorable mentions: Ha Eun Choi (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Potsdam), Gemma Dipoppa (Assistant Professor, Columbia University), and Shira Pindyck (Assistant Professor, US Naval War College).

2024 prize winners

• Emily Myers

  PhD candidate, Duke University
  Studies gender, conflict, and violence in Nepal, examining how women’s networks and familial relationships transform and are transformed by war, using original data and both quasi-experimental and qualitative methods. The prize supports a book project on local variation in women’s community participation during war.

• Alice Calder

  PhD candidate, University of New South Wales
  Studies the cultural and social factors that incentivize or disincentivize women to mobilize for political rights, with a focus on the impacts of conflict. Her current project examines the effect of the American Civil War on women’s mobilization for suffrage. The prize supports archival work in the US and UK.

• Soosun You

  PhD candidate, University of California, Berkeley
  Studies the consequences of macro-level change — shifting demographics and rising economic inequality — for women’s empowerment. Her dissertation uses observational, experimental, and archival data in South Korea on the politics of the marriage market and the relationship between gender roles and political behavior.

Honorable mentions: Elisabeth (Annie) Jarman (PhD candidate, Washington University in St. Louis), Yujing (Lisa) Fan (PhD candidate, Columbia University), and Nerea Gándara Guerra (European University Institute and EAFIT University).

2023 prize winners

• Emily Rains

  Assistant Professor of International Development, Tulane University
  Studies urban politics in developing countries, focusing on how living and working in informal spaces shapes political beliefs and behavior, and on gender gaps in political responses to urban informality. The prize supported a project on women’s informal leadership in urban settlements and fieldwork in Patna and Bangalore.

• Angie Torres-Beltran

  Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Michigan State University
  Studies gender, violence, and political participation in Latin America and the US, using multi-method analysis of Mexico including new municipal-level data on crime reports and women’s electoral participation. The prize funded archival research and a survey extension. Winner of the 2024 ISA Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Best Graduate Student Paper Award.

• Myles Williamson

  PhD candidate, University of Alabama
  Studies the effect of regime type and religion on the advancement of transgender rights cross-nationally. His project introduces the Trans Rights Indicator Project (TRIP), a measure of transgender rights worldwide from 2000 to 2021, disaggregating data on the LGBT community.

Honorable mentions: Emily Myers (Duke University), Sara Morell (University of Michigan), Maya Novak-Herzog (Northwestern University), Ari Ray (University of Geneva), Anirvan Chowdhury (University of California, Berkeley), and Camila Páez-Bernal (Arizona State University).

2022 prize winners

• Bhumi Purohit

  Assistant Professor, McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University
  Studies gender and comparative politics in India. Her paper “Bureaucratic Resistance Against Female Politicians: Evidence from Telangana, India” argues that gender bias combined with career incentives depresses delivery of public services fought for by women politicians. Winner of APSA’s William Anderson Award and APSA’s Women, Gender, and Politics Section Best Dissertation Award, both 2023.

• Sumin Lee

  Assistant Professor, Bush School of Government, Texas A&M University
  Studies international relations with a focus on sexual violence and domestic accountability surrounding armed conflict. Her paper presents an original dataset on domestic accountability for wartime sexual violence in conflict-affected African states, 1998–2018. Her dissertation won the APSA Human Rights Section Best Dissertation Award, 2023.

• Melina Much

  PhD candidate in Political Science, University of California, Irvine
  Studies American politics and methodology. Her dissertation interrogates how intersectionality has been used to study marginalization, using Bayesian multilevel modeling and machine learning to assess how attention to gender, race, and class would change the outcomes of previous studies.

Honorable mentions: Nirvikar Jassal (LSE), Elizabeth Brannon (Texas Tech University), and Rithika Kumar (University of Pennsylvania).

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The EGEN Prize Awards have been generously supported by NSF grant #2215500.