SSRC Inaugurates Three Graduate Student Fellowships
Poverty, immigration and energy are the three arenas studied by the inaugural recipients of new fellowships from the Social Science Research Council. The Charles E. Lindblom Memorial, William H. Janeway, and Walter W. Powell fellowships each provide an annual award of $7,500 to a graduate student at one of the member institutions of the College and University Fund for the Social Sciences. The New York-based SSRC announced the awards on Wednesday.
The focus of the 2026 competition was “Evaluating Interventions to Reduce Inequality.” Applications had to propose projects that evaluated the efficacy of an intervention — whether by public, nonprofit, and private organizations — to reduce some form of inequality. Projects are expected to result in the completion of an article-length paper within one year of the award.
The three recipients are:
Margarita Maria Rodriguez Morales, PhD candidate in public policy and sociology, University of Michigan | 2026–2027 Charles E. Lindblom Memorial Fellow
Rodriguez Morales’s research interests focus on the impact of technological systems on welfare bureaucrats’ diverse knowledges, decision-making, and everyday practices. Her dissertation, “The Algorithmic Pandora’s Box: Technologies for Poverty Targeting in Colombia,” explores the use of algorithmic technologies in Latin American welfare policymaking and their impacts on how states relate to their poorest citizens. Through a multi-sited bureaucratic ethnography of Colombia’s algorithmic poverty-scoring system, Margarita Maria examines how the materialities and practices of these technologies shape poverty governance, influencing how bureaucrats and experts define and address poverty, and how citizens experience it.
The Lindblom Memorial Fellowship honors Charles E. Lindblom (1917–2018), Sterling Professor of Political Science and Economics at Yale University. Funding for it comes from Dr. T.Y. Shen, a former SSRC fellow.
Fadilat Olasupo, PhD candidate in sociology, University of Michigan | 2026–2027 William H. Janeway Fellow
Olasupo’s research examines how Black immigrants interpret and navigate encounters with policing, criminalization, and immigration enforcement in the United States. Drawing on interviews with Nigerian and Jamaican immigrants in New York City, alongside legal advocates and community organizers, her “Deportability and Blackness: Racialized Immigration Enforcement in the US” develops the concept of “deportable Blackness” to theorize how racialized enforcement renders Black immigrants presumptively criminal and removable regardless of legal status, and evaluates how advocacy organizations contest these inequalities. Her dissertation research is also supported by the Russell Sage Foundation and Arizona State University. She is also a student researcher with the Carceral State Project at the University of Michigan, where she contributes to research on juvenile life without parole in the state of Michigan and misconduct in the criminal legal system.
The William H. Janeway Fellowship honors the tech entrepreneur’s service as a member and chair of the board of directors and his leadership as interim co-president from 2025–2026. It is awarded in support of emerging scholars whose work demonstrates intellectual ambition, innovation, and engagement with questions of broad public significance.
Rachel Herring, PhD candidate in environment & resources, Stanford University \ 2026–2027 Walter W. Powell Fellow
Herring, of theChoctaw Nation, investigates how to disrupt extractive capitalism and neoliberal sustainability strategies through decolonial approaches to energy. She employs ethnographic methods to investigate how energy infrastructures reflect and reproduce systems of power, and how infrastructure may instead serve as a tool of self-determination, as demonstrated in “Building Sovereignty: Native Women and Indigenous-Controlled Solar Education.” Previously, she has recommended policy alternatives for domestic mining with the Department of Energy’s Indian Energy Program, and has explored impacts of critical mineral extraction on Native land as a Kathryn Wasserman Davis Conflict Transformation Fellow. As a Fulbright Fellow and National Geographic Explorer, Herring explored the intersection between renewable energy development and the depopulation crisis in rural Japan. Her journalism has appeared in Jacobin and the New York Times.
The Walter W. Powell Fellowship honors “Woody” Powell’s service as a member of the board of directors since 2000, chair of the board and the executive committee, and interim co-president. It is awarded in support of emerging scholars whose work reflects excellence in social scientific inquiry, interdisciplinary collaboration, and public purpose.
