2026-27 AY PT Research Fellowship: Climate Change and Gender Relations
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:
This project examines how climate change reshapes gender inequality in rural India. Rather than focusing only on how climate change harms women, the research investigates how long-term agricultural decline affects young male farmers' marriage prospects and, in turn, transforms gender relations.
The Research Fellow will contribute to two major components of the project. First, they will help build and validate a large corpus of YouTube comments related to India's agrarian crisis, including data collection, machine-learning classification, and quality validation. Second, they will help construct an original observational dataset to evaluate the causal effects of irrigation canal construction on agricultural conditions and marriage outcomes using geospatial and administrative data. The position is ideal for students interested in political economy, development, climate change, gender, and computational social science.
Primary Research Mentor: Alyssa Heinze
Co-Research Mentor:
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:
- Collect, clean, and organize large-scale YouTube comment data using APIs and other computational tools.
- Assist with developing, validating, and improving text classification pipelines using large language models and other machine learning methods.
- Conduct quality assurance and validation of text-analysis outputs through manual coding and statistical evaluation.
- Build and document geospatial and administrative datasets related to irrigation canals, agriculture, and demographic outcomes.
- Merge datasets from multiple sources and prepare analysis-ready research files.
- Assist with observational causal inference analyses, including data cleaning, variable construction, and robustness checks.
- Conduct literature reviews on climate change, development, gender, and political economy.
- Produce clear documentation of datasets, code, and research workflows.
- Participate in regular research meetings and contribute to discussions of research design and findings.
Students qualifications:
- Coursework in economics, political science, statistics, data science, computer science, or a related field.
- Experience with Python or R for data analysis.
- Familiarity with causal inference, econometrics, or quantitative social science methods.
- Interest in computational social science or natural language processing.
- Strong organizational skills and attention to detail.
- Interest in climate change, development economics, gender, or comparative politics.
- Marathi language skills is a plus.
- Experience with GIS or geospatial data is a plus.
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)
Research Mentor Questions for Applicants:
- What languages do you know besides English and what is your proficiency?
