Six doctoral students who received competitive fellowships from the Kellogg Institute for International Studies are graduating in May or in the summer and have received placements at top institutions.

All received a PhD Fellowship, which awards doctoral students $5,000 per year for five years, and/or a Dissertation Year Fellowship. 

The graduates and their placements are: 

  • Stefanie Israel de Souza (Dissertation Year Fellow and former PhD Fellow, sociology) – postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy & Research at Tulane University in New Orleans. Israel de Souza studies topics including urban sociology, criminology, and global sociology. Her dissertation examines a proximity policy program in Brazil called “pacification” and is based on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in two Rio de Janeiro favelas.
  • M. Tahir Kilavuz (Dissertation Year Fellow, political science, graduating summer 2019)– postdoctoral fellow at the Middle East Initiative Program at the Belfer Center, Harvard Kennedy School. His dissertation examines the factors behind authoritarian persistence in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, and his broader research addresses the causes of coups d’etat, protest participation, survey analysis, and democratization in a cross-regional perspective. 
  • Will Jianyu Lu (Dissertation Year Fellow, economics) - Central Bank of Chile, Santiago, Chile. His work focuses on development, trade, and macroeconomics, including how, from a trade perspective, China’s National Trunk Highway System is changing the country.  
  • Carlos Rondon (PhD Fellow, economics) - Central Bank of Chile in Santiago, Chile. He studies international finance and monetary policy in emerging countries, with a focus on extreme events such as financial bubbles and sudden stops. 
  • Reyes Ruiz (PhD Fellow, economics) – vice president of the local public finance division at Altor Consulting in Mexico City. He studies the interactions between national and subnational levels of government in public delivery, and how efficient public sector debt management can contribute to the quality of those services. 
  • Lucía Tiscornia (Dissertation Year Fellow, PhD Fellow, political science) - Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas (CIDE) in Mexico City. Tiscornia studies criminal violence, conflict termination, and security sector reform.