Research Assistant Position

I am a research assistant working under Professor Marein, where I help him and Professor Nesson construct a homicide record database for the twentieth century. This database aims to analyze the fluctuations in homicide rates throughout the century and explore potential explanations for these trends.

Hi, I’m Caliway Buchanan. I’m a senior double majoring in Economics and Business & Enterprise Management. I began working as a Research Assistant to Dr. Todd McFall during the fall semester of my sophomore year. I’ve worked on several research projects including the PGA Tour and college athlete recruitment. I’ve also prepared research for economic conference presentations. As a Research Assistant, I am always learning how to approach different types of problems and data. I’ve really enjoyed working with Dr. McFall and I’m glad that I became a Research Assistant

I am Millet Ding, a senior double-majoring in Economics and Applied Math. I am currently working on a research project titled “Analyzing the Impact of Population Health Management Interventions for a Commercially Insured Patient Population”  with Dr. Tina Dalton (and her co-author Dr. Beata Debinski from the Family and Community Department, Wake Forest School of Medicine). My role primarily involves cleaning and merging electronic health records across 70+ variables to quantify the outcomes of population health interventions. This work has deepened my understanding of empirical research in healthcare and strengthened my technical skills in data analysis. I really enjoyed it!

My research primarily involves gathering, cleaning, and visualizing data for various research and teaching projects. Later in the term, the focus will shift to tasks related to a book project on creative destruction. I am working with Dr. John Dalton.

I’m a sophomore majoring in finance with a minor in philosophy. I work with Professor Curtis on research focused on green jobs—examining how they are defined, the skills they require, how they are created, their impact on the labor market, and their equity implications. Recently, our research has expanded to assess the quality of newly emerging green jobs, exploring their risk of automation, long-term sustainability, and whether they genuinely provide good opportunities for workers and the economy

For the last year, I’ve worked as a research assistant to Dr. Curtis, analyzing over 300,000,000 rows of LinkedIn profile data to examine the rise of green jobs amidst the ongoing green energy transition. My role primarily involves using the university’s high-performance computing cluster to run R, Python, and Stata scripts for data cleaning, as well as the creation of tables and figures. Working as an RA for Dr. Curtis has been an incredibly rewarding experience, providing me with valuable skills in economic research, coding, and big data analysis. After graduation in May, I’ll be joining the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta as an economic research analyst.

My name is Shaila Prasad and I’m a senior economics major with a psychology and journalism minor. As a research assistant for Professor Erik Nesson, I evaluate research papers and use Stata to help him and Dr. Brian Marein understand potential causes for the fluctuation in crime rates in the United States during the 20th century.

I am Wyla Solsbery, a senior double-majoring in Economics and Sociology. I am currently working with development, health, and labor economist Dr. Leah Lakdawala (and her coauthors) on a project titled: “Impacts of COVID Mortality on Voting Behavior: Evidence from Peru.” Our current findings show that in the months before election season in Peru, voters in the districts hit hardest by COVID-19 shifted their votes to more left-leaning parties. My role is primarily to manage and organize data, craft tables in LaTeX, and perform robustness checks, things that will prove incredibly helpful for my future career. After graduation in May of this year, I will be working a second internship at Forvis Mazars as a Transfer Pricing Consultant, doing similar work to assist multinational clients that deal with complicated transfer pricing legislation. The three semesters I’ve spent working as a Research Assistant with Dr. Lakdawala, such a great mentor and impressive researcher, have been amazing. I’ve learned from and been exposed to so much I could have never imagined.