Fellows & Awardees

Hilary Okoeguale is a Mandela Washington Fellow. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Benin and is currently in the fourth year of his second doctoral program at the Maurer School of Law, Indiana University. At Maurer, he has taught Academic Legal Writing: Dissertation Fundamentals, served as Graduate Colloquium Coordinator, and serves as Editor of the Maurer Global Forum Law Review series. Before joining Maurer, he held academic positions at Afe Babalola University and the National Open University of Nigeria. His strategic advocacy and interventions led to the enactment of the extant Administration of Criminal Justice Law of Ondo State, Nigeria, in 2016. He also served as visiting faculty at the Staley School of Leadership Studies at Kansas State University in the summer of 2022. His research interests include institutional analysis, constitutional design, and energy transition justice.

Trizah Atieno Ombewa is a Ph.D. student whose research focuses on media law and policy, digital governance, and the regulation of emerging communication technologies. Her scholarship examines the intersections of internet governance, platform accountability, online safety, and cybersecurity risk management, with particular attention to how legal and policy frameworks shape digital rights and protections for vulnerable populations. Her current research investigates child online protection through a polycentric governance lens, exploring how governments, regulatory agencies, digital platforms, and other stakeholders coordinate to address cybersecurity and online safety risks affecting children. More broadly, her work contributes to debates on media regulation, technology policy, digital rights, and platform governance, seeking to inform the development of effective, evidence-based policies for safer and more accountable digital environments.

Sohel Rana is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Indiana University Bloomington (IUB). He holds a master’s in applied statistics from IUB and a master’s in political science from Illinois State University (ISU). He has earned numerous awards, including Walter Burnham Award and Alice Ebel Scholarship from IUB and ISU respectively. He previously held academic appointments and worked in several research projects, including NSF-funded projects. His research focuses on comparative political economy. Sohel is particularly interested in understanding the effects of lands and natural resources on socio-economic, political, and institutional outcomes in diverse contexts. His methodological interests include mixed-methods, quantitative and causal modeling, and structured, focused comparison. His dissertation examines how knowledge of natural resources (e.g., oil and gas) shapes constitutional designs that affect private property rights in the long run.

Mahdi Taraghi is a third-year Ph.D. student in Environmental Science at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University Bloomington. He holds a Master’s degree in Water Resources Engineering and is passionate about the intersection of environmental policy, socio-environmental systems, and complex systems modeling. His research focuses on the dynamic interplay between human decision-making and environmental processes, using agent-based modeling to investigate complex interactions within socio-environmental systems.

Yogesh Upadhyay is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at Indiana University Bloomington. His research examines how competing approaches to water management reconfigure community, authority, knowledge, and collective governance in the Indian Himalayan Region. More broadly, his research interests span development politics, environmentalisms, and intersectionality. Previously, he worked with grassroots action-research organizations, researching and raising awareness about the socio-economic and environmental impacts of hydroelectric projects and inland waterways in the Ganga River Basin.

Xinyi Zhao is a PhD student in Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research focuses on collective action, disaster response, and state-society relations in contemporary China. Her dissertation examines the 2021 Henan flood, with particular attention to how volunteer rescue organizations, local communities, and other civil actors mobilized and coordinated during the disaster. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in urban and rural Henan, her research explores how collective action emerges under conditions of uncertainty and how it is shaped by uneven landscapes, infrastructures, and relations with the state. Her broader interests include political anthropology, environmental anthropology, infrastructure, and disaster.

Anasthascia Boateng is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology. Her research examines how African international students in the United States navigate transnational care, resource sharing, and family obligations within diasporic communities. Drawing on economic anthropology, migration studies, and diaspora philanthropy, she examines the concept of “Black Tax,” the expectation that individuals who achieve educational or economic mobility provide support to family and community members across borders. As an Ostrom research awardee and fellow, she investigates how informal institutions, collective action, and shared obligations shape students’ everyday lives and contribute to broader conversations about governance, reciprocity, and social support in transnational settings.

Angelina Yajie Chen is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research explores how transnational migrants self-organize to improve their lives and pursue onward mobility amid increasingly restrictive migratory regimes. Focusing on the transit city of Quito, Ecuador, her dissertation investigates the flexible mobility strategies, aspirations, and everyday experiences of Chinese transnational migrants arriving during the COVID-19 era.

Max Fang holds a J.D. degree and is currently an S.J.D. candidate at Indiana University Maurer School of Law. Max also serves as Lead Researcher for Data and Cyber Programs at the IU Ostrom Workshop. Max's research focuses on global tech governance through the lenses of law, international economics, and geopolitics; from which the topics of interest include AI governance, cybersecurity, space technology, ESG, blockchain, semiconductor policy, and internet law.

Kyuwoong Kyeong is a Ph.D. candidate at the O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington. His research explores how public employees and citizens respond to complex administrative contexts in which tensions arise among rules, discretion, and public values. His research interests include behavioral public administration, public sector decision-making, prosocial behavior, and citizen evaluations of government. Focusing on prosocial rule-breaking and whistleblowing, his dissertation examines how the meaning and consequences of these behaviors for citizens and public organizations vary across administrative and institutional contexts.

Lily Shanmugasundaram, Geography