2025-26 AY PT Research Fellowship: HarvestStat Asia
The Stanford King Center on Global Development’s Academic Year Part-Time Research Fellowship Program connects King Center faculty affiliates and affiliated researchers with undergraduate students committed to providing research support during autumn, winter, and spring quarters.
Students have the opportunity to engage in world-class research that has real-world impact. Undergraduate student research fellows are paid $19/hour*. Students must be enrolled full-time to participate and must be able to commit to research 8-10 hours per week.
*Students must attend orientation and submit an I-9 form to verify employment and receive payment. Students who cannot accept pay may be allowed to receive academic credit for this research.
Research Project Description:
A network of food security researchers around the world is busy putting together the first global harmonized subnational agricultural data from national reports, ministries of agriculture, etc. Often these are from LMICs and involve data that was kept in paper format, has finally been digitized, and now needs to be cleaned, documented, and published. We have a team that has prepared data cleaning scripts and a pipeline; a research assistant or assistants would work with our group to modify that pipeline for a country or two (or more, depending on their skills/availability/enthusiasm). The RA(s) would need some Python coding experience and ideally interest in one of the target countries (remaining countries include Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Laos, Nepal, and North Korea). The student(s) would be a coauthor on published datasets and would be able to use cleaned data for their own analyses of interest/research projects. The bulk of data processing work here would be in the fall (or that would be the aim), and then the RA(s) would work with others on the HarvestStat team and/or in my group to begin to use these data to answer key questions about agricultural adaptations in agricultural economies.
Primary Research Mentor: Professor Jen Burney (ESoS, ESS & FSE)
Stanford undergraduate students in good academic standing and enrolled full-time are eligible to apply. Co-term students must have undergraduate student status; if co-terms are in graduate billing status (after 12 quarters) they are ineligible to participate.
All majors are welcome!
Students Responsibilities:
1. Reading relevant research papers to understand what has been done and where our work fits (we don't expect you to know everything, and we are all always learning!).
2. Working with data and our models (we will orient and help you!) to help answer these questions. You will load, clean, analyze, and present analyses, and work on writing up results with teammates.
3. Great teammates - coming to team meetings, participating, asking questions, and being willing to help the group out!
4. Curious and motivated to try something even if you don't know that it will work out."
Students qualifications:
- Basic coding skills/experience in Python required. Experience with geospatial data a bonus, but not required.
Time Commitment:
The time commitment is 8-10 hours per week (equivalent to a 3-unit course) each academic quarter. The expectation is that students will work the full academic year with their mentor (Autumn, Winter, and Spring quarters). Students planning on studying abroad may not be eligible.
To Apply:
Along with the application, applicants are asked to submit:
- a cover letter
- resume or CV
- unofficial Stanford transcript (first quarter frosh do not need to submit transcripts for autumn quarter applications)
