2026-27 AY PT Research Fellowship: The Health Impacts From Pesticide Exposure Due to Monoculture Expansion in Costa Rica
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:
As the world population continues to grow, anthropogenic pressures on the earth’s resources increase as well, and many nations are faced with the challenge of housing and feeding their populations in a warming world. To meet the increasing demand for food and forest products, farming practices have increasingly shifted away from subsistence farming and towards large-scale monoculture cropping with management practices and technological applications (i.e., fertilizers and pesticides) that have increased crop yield and quality to meet global food demand at a lower cost. The rapid expansion of intensive agricultural activities, known as the “green revolution”, has dramatically changed the composition and management of land cover across the globe, while facilitating many social, institutional, and economic benefits. Yet, even as these benefits, such as food security and economic growth, are shared globally, the costs are concentrated in places where land conversion has occurred to meet the demand for commodities and exports from countries other than their own. Previous evidence has demonstrated a link between environmental degradation, pollution, deforestation, and biodiversity loss from agricultural expansion and intensification, yet many of these impacts remain understudied and unquantified at larger spatial and temporal scales.
Costa Rica has faced a rapid and large-scale shift to intensified agriculture and has one of the highest pesticide application rates in the world to support a variety of monoculture commodity crops. Despite Costa Rica's reputation as a sustainability leader, its intensive agricultural practices have resulted in significant environmental impacts. This research aims to quantify the social costs of monoculture cropping, particularly its impact on human health through these large-scale changes in the environment. The goal will be to integrate subnational health data with agricultural production data and remotely sensed land use data to be able to assess the consequences of monoculture cropping on local populations. Specifically, the use of pesticides to promote production of many of these speciality crops has been demonstrated to have severe consequences on health in other settings, but has not been quantified at scale in Costa Rica.
Given the increasing global reliance on export-oriented monoculture farming, Costa Rica serves as a critical case study to understand the broader implications of agrochemical use as other tropical nations face similar pressures to convert land to intensified agriculture.
Primary Research Mentor: Erin Mordecai
Co-Research Mentor: Emma Krasovich Southworth and Caroline Glidden
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:
- Review relevant literature
- Clean and merge datasets
- Find/obtain other relevant data
- Conduct meetings with potential stakeholders/researchers to move project forward
- Work with mentor on designing and implementing analysis
- Hold weekly meetings with mentor on project status
- Present project progress at lab meeting and/or posters at conferences
- Assist in writing up relevant sections of paper
- Design figures
- Help work on paper draft
Students qualifications:
- Ability to conduct independent literature review
- Experience with coding and data handling (merging, cleaning, visualizing).
- Interest in statistical/causal analysis (experience not necessary)
- Organizational skills to track project progress.
- Writing skills and familiarity with reading scientific papers.
- Preference for coding experience in R (Python experience is fine as well).
- Coursework and/or experience with statistics is preferred 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)
Research Mentor Questions for Applicants:
- What languages do you know besides English and what is your reading proficiency level?
