News and Awards

See consolidated graduate student news and awards here

The Lever covered Simon Y. Schachter and Robert Vargas's research on private donations to police. Read the article here.

Associate Professor Robert Vargas debated the merits of Chicago's investment in surveillance technology with a former Chicago Police Superintendent. See the WTTW segment here.

Doctoral candidate Timothy B. Elder will be Postdoctoral Fellowship at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice, Dartmouth College.

Assistant Professor Linda Zhao's co-authored paper, "Threats to Blue Networks: The Effect of Partner Injuries on Police Misconduct," is available in American Sociological Review.

Doctoral candidate Nicolás Torres-Echeverry is invited co-editor of Análisis Político's issue on "Cyberspace, Social Media, and Politics."

Doctoral candidate Ángela Zorro Medina accepted a position as Assistant Professor at University of Toronto-Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies with joint appointment at the Law School.

In an op-ed in the Chicago Sun-Times, Associate Professor Robert Vargas urges Chicago to apply the same evaluation standards to ShotSpotter as those applied to violence prevention programs. Read the op-ed here.

Doctoral student Cameron Day received a GGI Internship for 2023-2024. He will be working with the Civil Commitment Working Group.

Doctoral candidate Donghyun Kang received the Judge’s Choice award from UChicago MindByte 2023 for his poster presentation, “Limited Diffusion of Scientific Knowledge Forecasts Collapse.” 

Doctoral candidate Yuchen Yang received the 2023 Herbert Blumer Award for best graduate student paper from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction.

The Seminary Co-op is hosting a book release event for Professor Julian Go's Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US. Associate Professor Robert Vargas will moderate the discussion between Julian Go and Alex Vitale. More information here.

Professor Jenny Trinitapoli's new book explores how uncertainty motivates our actions in epidemics. Read coverage of the book, An Epidemic of Uncertainty: Navigating HIV and Young Adulthood in Malawi, here.

Associate Professor Geoff Wodtke and colleagues from the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility launch The Inequality Podcast, which "brings together scholars across disciplines to discuss the causes and consequences of inequality and strategies to promote economic mobility." Read the announcement here, and listen on Spotify, Google, Apple, or RSS Feed.

Associate Professor René D. Flores has been named a 2023-2034 Faculty Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Read more here.

Congratulations to Lauren Beard on being named an ASA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants (ASA DDRIG) Research Scholar. See the announcement here.

Doctoral candidates Lauren Beard and Ángela Zorro Medina received grants from the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy. Lauren won the Robert K. Merton Award for the project "The Transition Shock: Emancipating into State-Defined Adulthood" and Ángela won an award for the project "The Effects of Anti-Gang Laws on Crime and Inequality."

Associate Professor Robert Vargas is co-winner of the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the ASA's section on Race, Gender, and Class.

Congratulations to Pranathi Diwakar, who won the Division of the Social Sciences' 2023 Saller Prize for most outstanding dissertation of the year!

Citing research by Associate Professor René D. Flores and collaborators, Congress members introduced a bill to start collecting data on Middle Eastern and North African people. More information here. 

Congratulations to doctoral student Theodora Hurley, who received the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship for her project "Understanding Relationships between Sexuality and Health through Bisexual Health Disparities."