2026-27 AY PT Research Fellowship: Unintended Cost of Global Conservation
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:
In few places is the intersection of global health and environmental sustainability more salient than the Brazilian Amazon, where labor exploitation and deforestation are closely intertwined. Forest is cleared and converted to cattle pasture through a process that relies heavily on violence and exploitative labor, including modern slavery.
This research focuses on whether legal approaches to forest conservation have unintended consequences for modern slavery among cattle ranchers. Studies suggest that clean supply chain agreements with slaughterhouses have broadly reduced deforestation, particularly where forest loss is easily auditable via satellite. But no study has examined their impact on labor trafficking, for which monitoring capacity is extremely limited. Asymmetries in the credible threat of audit may incentivize increases in labor trafficking to offset the cost of more readily auditable environmental compliance. Alternatively, improved environmental compliance may have complementary benefits for labor conditions among affected farms. Preliminary data collection and exploratory analysis are already complete, and the fellow will work within an established team to extend existing work. The project sits within the Stanford Human Trafficking Data Lab, and the findings will inform a national-scale study to follow.
Primary Research Mentor: Grant Miller
Co-Research Mentor: Kimberly Babiarz and Haojie Wang
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:
- Clean, merge, and document panel datasets at the municipality-year and slaughterhouse level
- Produce descriptive statistics, maps, and event-study plots to support the casual inference analysis under the supervision of the research mentor
- Work with the team to conduct regression analyses of panel data using R or Stata
- Maintain clear version-controlled reproducible code under the supervision of the research mentor
- Assist with processing satellite land-cover data on Mapbiomas or Google Earth Engine
- Contribute to drafting sections of internal project docs, and summarizing methods and findings
- Attend weekly check-in meetings and present work in progress
Students qualifications:
- Coursework in data science, econometrics, statistics, or quantitative methods; familiarity with regression analysis and, ideally, causal inference designs
- Working proficiency in R, Python, or Stata for data cleaning and analysis
- Comfort handling large, messy administrative datasets, including merging across sources with imperfect identifiers
- Reliability with sensitive, high-risk data; the fellow will complete required CITI and HIPAA online trainings before accessing restricted data
- Preferred but not required: reading proficiency in Portuguese; experience with geospatial analysis
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:
- Describe your experience with R, Python, or Stata. What have you used them for, and how would you rate your proficiency?
- What is your reading proficiency in Portuguese, if any? (Not required, and we do not expect most applicants to have it).
