Nick Eubank is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Nick's research focuses on the relationship between democratic social capital and the effectiveness of civil society in holding politicians to account. Overcoming a key empirical shortcoming of the research on social capital, he measures social capital in terms of observable social network structures. Social networks are thought to shape the ability of citizens to interact, organize and share information – activities that are critical for effective policing of government activity. Yet due primarily to a lack of data in developing countries, we have very little empirical evidence on this topic. Nick uses six months of detailed and geocoded telecommunications data from a cell phone provider in Zambia to test the relationship between social network properties and the capacity of citizens to engage in social sanctioning, collective action, and informal information sharing.

Aaron Horvath is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and a PACS PhD fellow for 2015-16. He is interested in how organizational and economic shifts shape the way citizens engage with and attempt to shape society. In particular, his research explores the transformation of organizational structures in American life and its implications for collective civic engagement, contentious politics, public agendas, and the practice of democracy.

Lily Lamboy is a PhD student in the political science department at Stanford with concentrations in political theory, gender equality, American government and constitutional law. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree (highest honors) in Government and Ethics from Smith College in 2010. Her honors thesis, entitled “Her Body, His Choice? Comparing Men’s and Women’s Claims to Procreative Privacy”, carved out a legal and philosophical rationale for grounding abortion claims in a right to bodily integrity. As an undergraduate, Lily was a Leanna Brown Fellow in Women and Law and a Presidential Fellow with the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress.

Jason Huang is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Economics at Stanford University. His research employs both theoretical and empirical to analyze topics relating to taxation and various other government programs. His current research develops an empirical strategy to recover the causal impact of different types of foster homes on children outcomes. He hopes that his research can be used to guide placement policies. When complemented with other works that examine how foster families react to economic benefits, this project can also suggest optimal financial structure for the child welfare agencies. Jason also aims to use tools from statistics and machine learning to answer questions from social science. He is a member of the Stats for Social Good group at Stanford. This summer, he will be in University Chicago as a Fellow for Data Science for Social Good. Jason received his B.A. in Economics with a minor in Operations Research from Princeton.

Igor Popov is a 2015-16 Stanford PACS fellow and a graduate student in economics pursuing questions in public finance, industrial organization, behavioral economics, and other areas of applied microeconomics.