Research Prizes

Since the prize

Most EGEN awardees held the prize as graduate students. They have since moved into tenure-track positions, named professorships, and postdoctoral fellowships across the United States and Europe. Listed below is where each awardee is now, rather than where they were when they received the prize, along with the publications and awards their projects have produced.

2025

Prize winners

• Alyssa Heinze

  Postdoctoral Fellow, King Center on Global Development, Stanford University; incoming Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California, Davis (Fall 2027)
  Studies gendered understandings of the political economy of local development, political inequality, and the consequences of climate change, with a focus on India. Her book project, Agriculture and Patriarchy: Growing and Severing the Roots of Male Dominance, examines 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

  Assistant Professor of Political Science, Louisiana State 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.

  “Public Employment and Gendered Recruitment in China.” PhD dissertation, Syracuse University.

• 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

  Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Political Science, University of Zurich
  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

  Assistant Professor of Politics and International Relations, Lake Forest College
  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 Researcher, Department of Political Science and Public Administration, University of Potsdam
  Studies international political economy and international institutions. Her dissertation examines how provisions on women’s rights are written into trade agreements. PhD, Michigan State University.

• Gemma Dipoppa

  Assistant Professor of Political Science, Columbia University
  Studies contemporary threats to state capacity, including organized crime, migration, and environmental enforcement, and evaluates policies aimed at combating criminal governance.

• Shira Pindyck

  Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs, US Naval War College
  Studies international security and military innovation, including how tactical and technological change unsettles gender hierarchies inside military organizations. Her book project is Innovation and Inclusion in the Armed Forces.

2024

Prize winners

• Emily Myers

  Postdoctoral Research Affiliate, International Relations and Data Science, ETH Zurich
  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 in Economics, 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.

  “One Question at a Time: The Impact of the American Civil War on Mobilization for Women’s Suffrage.” Working paper.

• Soosun You

  James Joo-Jin Kim Korean Studies Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania
  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

  Postdoctoral Research Associate, Representation and Politics in Legislatures Lab, University of Notre Dame
  Studies the causes and consequences of gendered hostility online. Her dissertation uses natural language processing on three million mentions of US state legislators to show that while men and women receive similar volumes of general hostility, women face roughly twice as much gender-specific abuse.

  Sophonisba Breckinridge Award for the best paper on women and politics, MPSA, 2024.

• Yujing (Lisa) Fan

  Postdoctoral Researcher in Comparative Politics, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford
  Studies gender and authoritarian regimes. PhD, Columbia University.

• Nerea Gándara Guerra

  Postdoctoral Researcher, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
  Studies public opinion, political behavior, and social movements, with a focus on gender and social norms. PhD, European University Institute, 2024.

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-Beltrán

  Assistant Professor, School of Government and Public Policy, University of Arizona
  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.

  “Three Essays on Gender, Violence, and the State.” PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 2024. ISA Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Best Graduate Student Paper Award, 2024.

• Myles Williamson

  Lecturer, School of Public and International Affairs, University of Baltimore
  Studies the effect of regime type and religion on the advancement of transgender rights cross-nationally. His prize project introduced the Trans Rights Indicator Project (TRIP), a measure of transgender rights worldwide from 2000 to 2021, disaggregating data on the LGBT community.

  “A Global Analysis of Transgender Rights: Introducing the Trans Rights Indicator Project (TRIP).” Perspectives on Politics 22(3): 799–818. Honorable mention, APSA Comparative Politics Section Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba Best Dataset Award, 2024.

Honorable mentions

• Emily Myers

  Postdoctoral Research Affiliate, International Relations and Data Science, ETH Zurich
  Went on to win the prize outright in 2024. See above.

• Sara Morell

  Assistant Professor of Political Science, The College of New Jersey
  Studies American politics, gender, representation, and political participation. Her book project examines how women’s candidate training organizations shape political ambition and representation across race, ethnicity, and party. APSA Congressional Fellow, 2025–26.

• Maya Novak-Herzog

  Assistant Professor of Politics, Centre College
  Studies why institutional efforts to prevent sexual violence, including Title IX, have struggled to reduce it. Her book project examines how people on college campuses understand consent, and whether policy and training reflect those understandings. PhD, Northwestern University, 2025.

• Ari Ray

  Senior Researcher (SNSF Ambizione), Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Geneva
  Studies the institutional drivers of socio-political inequality, including the conditions under which people from structurally disadvantaged backgrounds attain public office and how their presence shapes economic policy.

• Anirvan Chowdhury

  Assistant Professor of Political Science and Aung San Suu Kyi Endowed Chair in Asian Democracy, University of Louisville
  Studies social norms and political participation, with a focus on gender, religion, and conservatism in South Asia. His book project, Domesticating Politics, explains how religiously conservative parties mobilize women in India.

  “Religiously Conservative Parties and Women’s Political Mobilization.” PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2023. Four APSA section best dissertation awards in a single year: Political Economy (Mancur Olson Award), Religion and Politics (Aaron Wildavsky Award), Political Communication (Thomas E. Patterson Award), and Women, Gender, and Politics, all 2024.

• Camila Páez-Bernal

  Assistant Professor Educator, School of Public and International Affairs, University of Cincinnati
  Studies women’s contentious politics in Colombia and Mexico, including political violence, transitional justice, and women’s participation in social movements. PhD, Arizona State University, 2024.

2022

Prize winners

• Bhumi Purohit

  Assistant Professor of Public Policy, McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University
  Studies gender and comparative politics in India. Her prize project argues that gender bias combined with career incentives depresses delivery of the public services fought for by women politicians.

  “Bureaucratic Discretion Against Female Politicians.” Comparative Political Studies, 2026. “Laments of Getting Things Done.” PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2022. APSA William Anderson Award and APSA Women, Gender, and Politics Section Best Dissertation Award, both 2023.

• Sumin Lee

  Assistant Professor of International Affairs, Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University
  Studies international relations with a focus on sexual violence and domestic accountability surrounding armed conflict. Her prize project presented an original dataset on domestic accountability for wartime sexual violence in conflict-affected African states, 1998–2018.

  “Ruling Rebel Parties and Accountability for Wartime Sexual Violence,” with Elizabeth Brannon. Security Studies 34(3): 564–589, 2025. “Gender Justice for Whom?” PhD dissertation, Rutgers University–New Brunswick, 2022. APSA Human Rights Section Best Dissertation Award, 2023.

• Melina Much

  Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Social Media and Politics, New York University
  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.

  “Bayesian Multilevel Modeling for the Intersections of Race, Gender, and Class.” Political Research Quarterly 78(3): 985–1006, 2025.

Honorable mentions

• Nirvikar Jassal

  Assistant Professor of Political Science, Department of Government, London School of Economics
  Studies policing, crime, and criminal justice in South Asia, including gender in police and judicial responses to women’s cases in India.

• Elizabeth Brannon

  Assistant Professor of Political Science, Indiana University
  Studies gender, conflict, and post-war politics, including how women’s political representation rises after war and what that means for foreign policy. PhD, Michigan State University, 2021.

• Rithika Kumar

  Assistant Professor of Political Science, Rice University
  Studies gender, urbanization, and politics in India. Her dissertation shows that male out-migration can lift restrictions on women’s political engagement in migrant-sending communities.

  “Left Behind or Left Ahead? Implications of Male Migration on Female Political Engagement.” PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2023.

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