NSF Graduate Research Fellowships awarded to three UGA economics students

No U.S. university produced more than three in the field this year
Recently named NSF Graduate Research Fellows

Each year the National Science Foundation supports the best and brightest of the nation’s young researchers with grants from the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program to help fund their research and education.

This spring, three students who received their undergraduate degrees in economics from the University of Georgia were awarded the prestigious fellowship. Bailey Palmer, originally from Atlanta, Jordan Peeples of Griffin, and Zach Weingarten of Acworth are among the 10 UGA undergraduates and alumni awarded graduate fellowships this year by the NSF.

The NSF fellowships, which recognize and support outstanding graduate students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, are among the most competitive in the United States. The three fellowships awarded to students from UGA’s Department of Economics were among only 44 granted to students in the field of economics nationally. And no degree-granting institution produced more than three in the field.

“It has been a personal privilege of mine to teach each of these outstanding students, and I congratulate them on their selection as NSF Graduate Research Fellows. We are proud of their success and look forward to following their achievements in graduate school and beyond,” said Chris Cornwell, head of the Department of Economics and the Selig Chair for Economic Growth at the Terry College of Business.

Each of the students started their research careers as undergraduates, with support from the UGA Honors Program, and will continue to produce new scholarship as they pursue their doctoral research.

Bailey Palmer completed her bachelor’s degrees in both Arabic and economics in 2018. Palmer’s undergraduate research as a UGA Foundation Fellow scholarship recipient focused on the impact of drought on upsurges in violence among terrorist groups. Specifically, she focused on whether periods of drought in sub-Saharan Africa were correlated with increased violence by the Islamist militia Al Shabab. She has been studying in a predoctoral program at Princeton University since her graduation from UGA and plans to study labor and development economics as she begins her Ph.D. program this fall. Palmer is also managing a project measuring the impacts of criminal record reduction or record expungement on labor markets.

Jordan Peeples completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 2019 and is pursuing a doctoral degree in economics at the University of Pennsylvania. She plans to study the way human capital affects a nation’s education policies and long-term development. As a master’s student, she wrote her thesis on “Gender Differences in STEM Major Choice: The Effects of Relative GPA Placement.” Her project focused on looking at the GPAs of men and women in both STEM and non-STEM courses and if that predicted success in a STEM career field.

Zach Weingarten will graduate this May with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics and begin a doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania. He plans to use the NSF fellowship to pursue research into the economics of education policy. Specifically, he wants to study the long-term educational impacts of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder diagnoses, known as ADHD, on elementary-age students. His master’s thesis evaluated multigenerational occupations in some families and their impact on the gender gap in STEM professions.

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program is the oldest fellowship of its kind. According to the NSF website, 42 fellows have gone on to become Nobel laureates, and more than 450 have become members of the National Academy of Sciences.

In addition to the prestige of the award, fellows earn a three-year annual stipend of $34,000 along with a $12,000 tuition allowance.