The IQSS community includes a cohort of graduate students in programs all across Harvard University and active in a wide range of social science research. The end of the academic year always brings with it the departure of some of those graduate students as they finish their Harvard programs and while it is a bittersweet time for us, we are excited to see what our graduating affiliates have waiting for them on the next steps of their journeys. Below is a collection of updates from a few of those affiliates going on to continue their work beyond Harvard.
2023 Outgoing Graduate Student Affiliates
Sean Bock (PhD, Sociology)
Sean will be joining Abt Associates as a Data Analytics Specialist. His team works with subject matter experts, providing statistical and data expertise on projects primarily in the areas of climate, environment, energy, and public health.
Kevin DeLuca (PhD, Political Economy and Government)
Kevin will be starting this fall as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University.
Cory McCartan (PhD, Statistics)
Cory is first spending a year as a Faculty Fellow at NYU's Center for Data Science, before joining the faculty in the Department of Statistics at Penn State.
Michael McGarrah (PhD, Human Development, Learning & Teaching)
Michael has accepted a position as a Statistician at the United States Department of Education, where he will serve as Study Director for the Crime & Safety Surveys Program, within the Institute of Education Science’s National Center for Education Statistics. Michael will also stay on at Harvard as a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate School of Education, where he will further develop and disseminate his research on early warning signs for substance use in late elementary and middle school, and means of substance use prevention and intervention for at-risk students.
Tara Nicola (PhD, Culture, Institutions, and Society)
Tara will be joining Gallup as a Senior Consultant in their education division supporting mixed methods higher education research projects.
Harry Oppenheimer (PhD, Government)
Harry is moving to Washington, DC as a Technology and International Security postdoctoral fellow at the University of California Institute for Global Cooperation and Conflict. While there, his work will be sponsored by the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In 2024, he will begin as an assistant professor at the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy.
Casey Petroff (PhD, Political Economy and Government)
Casey will start in fall 2023 as an assistant professor at the University of Rochester.
Tianyu Su (DDes, Urban and Design Technology)
An awardee of multiple IQSS grants, Tianyu has successfully defended his doctoral dissertation, "SocioLens: Potentials and challenges of large-scale social media data to understand human behavior in cities." Through a combination of computational, quantitative, and qualitative research methods, Tianyu's work delved into the emerging field of urban technology from a critical perspective. His research proposed a framework to analyze technological applications in smart city development and laid a foundation for responsible urban technology. Moving forward, Tianyu will work as a Senior Researcher at IBM Research's Responsible & Inclusive Technology Group for the summer of 2023. He is open to research scientist, quantitative researcher, and data scientist roles starting this fall and can be reached at sutianyu113@gmail.com; you can read more at Tianyu's website.
Yuhao “Finn” Wang (MA, Regional Studies: East Asia)
Yuhao will be joining McKinsey & Company as a business analyst at the Washington DC office following graduation this spring. His master's thesis, titled "Opening Up Without Reform: China’s State Sector in the Age of Hyper-Globalization," is nominated for the Joseph Fletcher Memorial Award, an award given to a student or students in the RSEA program for a research thesis that demonstrates a high standard of excellence.
Congratulations to all of our graduating affiliates, from your colleagues at IQSS!
