Research Experience

I was invited to join Dr. Kim Yi Dionne's lab in December 2021, shortly after my first quarter at UCR. Since then, I have assisted in numerous political science research projects.

Political Science Research in Malawi Project: I synthesized and coded research content and authorship data of twelve academic journals published in 2022-2023 to analyze the prevalence of Malawian researchers and research in political science journals. 

Covid-19 in Malawi Project: I manually gathered and coded newspaper data reflecting the public conversation on COVID-19 in Malawi spanning 2020-2022. The data was gathered from The Nation, the top newspaper in Malawi. 

Undergraduate Research in MSIs: Over the course of several months in 2022 the DPERLab published a research paper entitled Undergraduates and Political Science Research: Insights from Research Assistants in a Minority-Serving Institution Lab. My main contributions were co-authoring a large portion of the "Analysis" and "Results" section, and transcribing interview audio. 

Democratic Republic of the Congo Election Research: I scourged through multiple academic journals for relevant research regarding the then-upcoming DRC 2023 Presidential election. I synthesized the relevant articles and complied an annotated bibliography. 

Liberian Elections Research: I searched for and collected dozens of reliable resources on the Liberian elections and created an annotated bibliography on the identified articles. I also wrote a comprehensive guide on this specific process of gathering research. 

DPERL Website

The MSIRA Fellowship is a 20-week program at UCR, dedicated to providing undergraduate political science students hands-on research experience, created by Drs. Kim Yi Dionne, Marissa Brookes, and Jennifer Merolla. 

As an MSIRA Fellow, I received formal training in social science research methods via a 10-week course. (September-December 2023) 

Then, I completed a 10-week research apprenticeship, where I supported Dr. Joshua Wood's research on the impact of Chat-GPT and AI tools on student academic performance. (January-March 2024) 

Upon completion of the mandated 10-week apprenticeship, Dr. Wood invited me to continue working on the research project until the data analysis period ended. (March 2024-July2024) 

Over the course of these seven months, I collected and organized several academic quarters worth of student test and assignment score data for analysis, and investigated correlations between score irregularities and the emergence of AI tools like ChatGPT, and different mediums of assignment delivery. Additionally, I gained mentorship experience by guiding newer research assistants during the research process. 

MSIRA Website