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JOHANNES HIMMELREICH, assistant professor of public administration and international affairs, received the Birkhead-Burkhead Teaching Excellence Award and Professorship.

The annual honor recognizes outstanding teaching in the Public Administration and International Affairs (PAIA) Department. Recipients are nominated by current students and selected by a committee comprised of former award winners. Honorees hold the professorship for four years.

The award honors two former Maxwell School PAIA professors: Guthrie Birkhead and Jesse Burkhead. Guthrie Birkhead was a faculty member in the PAIA and Political Science departments from 1950 until his death in 2013. He was dean of the Maxwell School from 1977 until 1988, and he served as director of the Metropolitan Studies Program (now part of Maxwell’s Center for Policy Research). Jesse Burkhead was a faculty member in the Department of Economics from 1949 until his death in 1996. An expert on public budgeting, he retired as Maxwell Professor of Economics. In 1956, he authored the highly acclaimed book, Government Budgeting.

Himmelreich’s research focuses on the ethics of autonomous systems such as drones, self-driving cars or artificial intelligence.

DANIEL MCDOWELL, associate professor of political science, was selected to be a member of the 2022-23 Wilson China Fellowship class, a China-focused nonresidential fellowship supporting the next generation of American scholarship on China. It is made possible by the generous support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

McDowell’s study is titled “Lending Tree: Understanding Chinese Bank Branch Growth in Foreign Markets” and will explore what is behind Chinese bank expansion abroad while probing the implications of branch presence in these markets.

The project will focus on the links between the Belt and Road Initiative and branch locations while also considering how branch presence may affect the use of China’s currency in cross-border trade settlement. Growing influence for Chinese banks around the world would mean increased competition for U.S. financial institutions in those markets. In time, this could lead to a diminished role for the dollar in these economies, weakening the effectiveness of U.S. financial sanctions.

The Wilson Center, chartered by Congress as the official memorial to President Woodrow Wilson, is a non-partisan policy forum for tackling global issues through independent research and open dialogue to inform actionable ideas for Congress.

CATHERINE HERROLD, associate professor of public administration and international affairs, has received a Fulbright Scholar award to live and study in Serbia for seven months starting in the Spring 2023 semester. She will interact extensively with local residents and collaborate with scholars at the University of Belgrade.

Herrold spent five years doing similar research in Egypt and Palestine for her award-winning book Delta Democracy: Pathways to Incremental Civic Revolution in Egypt and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2020).

A senior research associate in the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration, Herrold examines how people cultivate democratic citizenship through their work with voluntary grassroots groups and local philanthropic entities, as opposed to in professional nongovernmental organizations.

SABA SIDDIKI, associate professor of public administration and international affairs and Chapple Family Professor of Citizenship and Democracy, is co-principal investigator for a research project that has been awarded $750,000 from the National Science Foundation.

The project, titled “Strengthening American Electricity Infrastructure for an Electric Vehicle Future: An Energy Justice Approach,” will investigate, among other things, how the widespread adoption of electric vehicles may impact those who continue to use gas-powered vehicles—in particular, those in low- to moderate-income communities.

Siddiki and a team from George Mason University will integrate social and techno-engineering approaches to holistically assess and help mitigate energy injustice introduced by a transition to electric vehicles. “While the widespread adoption of electric vehicles is seen as a key strategy to curb carbon emissions, reduce air pollution and improve public health,” says Siddiki, “existing research has not shown how it may contribute to energy injustice and widen existing equity gaps.”

LEONARD LOPOO, Paul Volcker Chair in Behavioral Economics and professor of public administration and international affairs, is among the co-investigators on a new $240,000 National Science Foundation grant supporting peer-to-peer academic coaching.

The grant was awarded to the University’s Center for Learning and Student Success to expand a coaching program that acquaints students with effective learning strategies and helps them adopt those tactics in their STEM and other classes.

The grant for “Coaching to Learn: A Peer-to-Peer Intervention to Help College Students Apply and Transfer Effective Learning Strategies Across STEM Courses” builds on the center’s pilot work of the past three years and adds an expanded research component to measure outcomes.

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