This summer, seven UChicago Harris master’s students gained new research experience, skills and connections through EPIC’s graduate student research fellowships.
The two programs, the James Bartlett Fellowship Program in Energy and Environmental Policy and DRW Graduate Fellowship in Economics and Policy, provide students with paid research positions working on energy, environment or climate research projects led by UChicago faculty.
The summer 2026 cohort worked with their faculty mentors on projects spanning law, science and policy research. During these full-time summer positions, fellows gained skills in data analysis, coding, writing and more.
Continue reading to learn more about the research projects our fellows worked on this summer and hear reflections on their experience.
Sinan Grehan
DRW Fellow; Mentor: Hajin Kim
Sinan Grehan is an M.S. in Computational Analysis and Public Policy (MSCAPP) student at the Harris School of Public Policy. This summer, he worked with Law School Assistant Professor Hajin Kim on two projects: studying the effectiveness of corporate sustainability reporting, and analyzing the impact of Sackett v. EPA on wetland regulation.
“As someone who’s interested generally in policy research, but also more specifically environmental policy research, I definitely gained a lot out of this summer. My internship allowed me to directly engage with new policy research methods as well as ones I already knew. I also bolstered my existing programming experience in R, as well as gained legal research experience. With this broadened experience, I hope to use these methods in a future policy research/civic tech environment.”
Dohyun Kim
Bartlett Fellow; Mentor: B. B. Cael
Dohyun Kim is a Master of Public Policy candidate at the Harris School of Public Policy. This summer, she worked with Geophysical Sciences Assistant Professor B.B. Cael on a project building and validating a numerical model of optimal carbon abatement investment under technology change, starting from a single sector and expanding to a multi sector setting.
“This project gave me hands-on experience turning economic theory into a tool policymakers can actually use: translating governing equations into code that shows how to allocate carbon budgets and abatement investment across sectors. That combination of rigorous quantitative modeling and policy relevant framing is exactly the skill set I want to bring to policy work. It also gave me conviction that I want to keep applying quantitative methods to real-world challenges like climate change and disaster risk management throughout my career.”
Firouz Niazi
DRW Fellow; Mentor: Kiran Chawla
Firouz Niazi is a Master of Public Policy candidate at the Harris School of Public Policy. This summer, he worked with Law School Lecturer Kiran Chawla writing a case study on New York City’s climate mitigation capacities. He used this case study as the example municipality to assess how subnational governments of different capacities in the US (constitutional, fiscal and political) may respond to a changing federal climate and disaster management system.
“This experience has reinforced my expertise in subnational policy/climate solution brainstorming, by way of taking into account both law, policy and economics. This encapsulates the core reason that I decided to attend Harris; to acquire the financial and economic know-how to approach policy problems from not only a pure policy perspective, but also the fiscal-side of the house. With Dr. Chawla, I accomplished both, and also had the pleasure of learning about legal theories, too.”
Wendy Wang
Bartlett Fellow; Mentor: Eyal Frank
Wendy Wang is an M.S. student in Computational Analysis and Public Policy (MSCAPP) at the Harris School of Public Policy. This summer, she worked with Harris Assistant Professor Eyal Frank studying how climate and weather shape wildlife populations and wildlife-vehicle collisions. Wang was responsible for building some of the core data pipelines: extracting and processing climate data from Google Earth Engine’s servers, constructing a county-year population dataset from Census sources spanning 1980-2025, and combining the different datasets (weather, wildlife, and collisions) into the panel used for estimation and analysis.
“The project touched on pretty much every course and skill from my first year of graduate school: computational thinking, statistical reasoning, understanding how different components of a technical project fit together. It was satisfying to see how that paid off.”
Yuxuan Zhang
Bartlett Fellow; Mentor: Shaoda Wang
Yuxuan Zhang is a Master of Public Policy student at the Harris School of Public Policy. As a Bartlett Fellow, she worked with Harris Associate Professor Shaoda Wang on a global randomized controlled trial studying whether providing air pollution information can strengthen environmental accountability and improve governance. Her role focused on identifying and mapping accountability channels across cities, including government agencies, NGOs, and media organizations.
“Through this project, I further developed my research, data collection, and project management skills. I learned how to turn a broad research question into a systematic data collection process, work with information from many different institutional and online sources, and validate data carefully before using it for research. I also gained experience working independently on a large-scale international research project and communicating research progress with a team.”
Xiaokang Zhou
Bartlett Fellow; Mentor: Hyuk-Soo Kwon
Xiaokang Zhou is a Master of Arts in Public Policy with Certificate in Research Methods (MACRM) student at the Harris School of Public Policy. As a Bartlett Fellow, Zhou worked with Harris Assistant Professor Hyuk-soo Kwon on research examining how government policies shape the development of the electric vehicle market, particularly the interaction between EV adoption and charging infrastructure. Her main role was to build and refine policy datasets, including charging-station subsidies and government EV targets across Chinese cities and provinces.
“Working closely with EV and charging-infrastructure policies showed me that good policy research requires not only quantitative skills, but also a detailed understanding of the industry, policy design, and institutional context behind the data. The experience also encouraged me to read policy documents more carefully and think about how specific rules may affect market behavior. In addition, working with PhD students, other research assistants, and faculty helped me build connections with researchers who share similar interests and gave me a clearer view of an academic career in policy research.”
Zhiyuan Zhou
DRW Fellow; Mentor: Olga Rostapshova
Zhiyuan Zhou is a Master of Public Policy student at the Harris School of Public Policy. As a DRW Fellow, he worked with Olga Rostapshova at the Energy & Environment Lab. Zhou supported the Clean Air Act Machine Learning (CAA-ML) project, where he focused on two parallel tracks. On the health impacts side, he built and validated the end-to-end pipeline, covering CAA allocation, InMap (Intervention Model for Air Pollution) Source Receptor Matrix prediction-error modeling, and Monte Carlo uncertainty simulation. On the emissions side, he helped implement the delta Synthetic Difference-in-Differences (SDiD) design, ran estimation and bootstrap jobs on the High Performance Computing system, and conducted comprehensive testing against model design specifications to verify its robustness.
“This fellowship immersed me in a group of exceptionally dedicated and brilliant minds in energy and environmental policy. Collaborating with them taught me how to tackle massive, open-ended problems into granular, modular components, where each is independently testable, yet strategically aligned with our overarching objectives. Learning this balance of modular thinking and collaborative rigor is a framework that will fundamentally shape my future career in public policy.”