Three members of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy won Faculty-Student Research Awards: Yueming Lucy Qiu, Alec Worsnop and Susan Parker.
Professor Yueming Lucy Qiu, with the help of PhD student Xingchi Shen, won a Faculty-Student Research Award of $10,000 for their project on the effects of global environmental events on consumers’ electricity consumption behavior. The study focuses on four events in particular: Earth Hour, World Environment Day, Earth Day, and National Energy-Saving Publicity Week.
The awards, presented by the University of Maryland Graduate School, provide financial support for graduate students helping to advance a research-related project. Using the award, Qiu and Shen intend to analyze new data sets to acquire a deeper understanding of the impact of environmental events.
“We want to basically combine other new data sets, such as social media data…in order to explain what type of behaviors that can explain the change in consumption…and we also want to combine other types of methods to basically better explore the causal mechanism to explain the behavior, so we’re also going to do surveys as well as policy documents review,” says Qiu.
Awardees Susan Parker and Alec Worsnop’s projects focus on the long term effects of conditional cash transfers on children’s health and measuring the influence of civil-military configurations, respectively. Parker is working with Soomin Ryu, third year doctoral student at SPP, and Worsnop is partnering with Michael Cowan, a PhD student studying government and politics.
"We are very excited to receive support from the Graduate School and look forward to getting our research underway. We believe that this research will assist policymakers as they seek to contribute to de-escalating on-going conflicts because planning how to counter and negotiate with violent non-state actors requires understanding how they approach the integrated tasks of war-fighting and state-building," says Worsnop.