Research Assistant Position

I am a sophomore majoring in Economics with a minor in Global Trade and Commerce Studies. My research with Professor Lakdawala has given me the opportunity to explore a range of topics related to monetary policy. Using R, I have created data visualizations to examine how the 10-year Treasury yield and S&P 500 returns respond to Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements and meetings over the past few decades. I have also compiled and organized data on monetary policy communications from the Reserve Bank of India. Additionally, I investigated individual economists’ political affiliations for a project which looked to determine whether their forecasting was impacted by political bias. All of this research has strengthened my data analysis skills and deepened my understanding of how monetary policy decisions shape economic outcomes over time.

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’m working with Dr. Mouton on an NLP project that uses SBERT to link occupational task descriptions with USPTO patent abstracts. Using SBERT (NLP model), I embed each task and abstract to retrieve its semantic information, compute cosine‐similarity scores between embeddings, and use these scores to evaluate how similar a patent and task are. Currently, we are using the Open AI API to auto‑generate “match/no‑match” labels to generate training data so we can finetune the SBERT model to better gauge pair similarity. This lets us see which emerging technologies correspond to specific work activities and gives us insights into how skills and inventions align. Future improvements include refining the pipeline, fine tuning the model, and utilizing it to gain insights from labor-related data.

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.

I’m a senior majoring in Economics and double minoring in Computer Science and Entrepreneurship. I have worked with Dr. Curtis on research examining the economic impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). My role involves locating, cleaning, and analyzing datasets related to government funding allocations to understand how these federal investments are distributed across various sectors of the economy. I’ve become well-versed in tracking IRA implementation and its potential implications for economic development. This experience has strengthened my data analysis skills while providing valuable insights into how major climate policy initiatives translate into economic realities

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.

Hi, I’m Ives Xue, a senior double majoring in Statistics and Economics. I’ve been working as a Research Assistant for Dr. Alex Yu, and my work is mainly processing environmental related data sets. Recently, I am working on projects related to EMS (Emergency Medical Services) data in New York City. My work includes developing alternative ways to classify disadvantaged communities using ACS demographic data, reconstructing EMS dispatch zones based on historical data, and analyzing how service patterns vary across zip codes—especially between DAC and non-DAC areas. I’ve also compared healthcare outcomes like emergency room costs and hospital stays, built web scrapers to collect hospital information, and supported the project with data cleaning, visualization, and LaTeX documentation. This experience has taught me how to work with real-world data, uncover patterns, and present findings clearly. I’m grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this meaningful work.