Kellogg Institute PhD Fellow Mayra Ortiz-Ocaña has been named a 2026 Emerging Scholar by The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, one of nine doctoral candidates selected internationally for research that advances understanding of violence and its consequences.
The Harry Frank Guggenheim Emerging Scholar Awards recognize promising researchers in the final year of writing a doctoral dissertation examining a significant aspect of violence. The Foundation gives priority to research addressing urgent, contemporary problems and selected this year’s scholars through a rigorous evaluation process.
Ortiz-Ocaña’s dissertation, “Gatekeeping Justice: Criminal Epistemologies in Prosecuting Organized Crime Violence,” examines questions surrounding the prosecution of organized crime violence. Drawing on more than 100 interviews and a novel dataset of legal decisions in organized crime cases, she found that prosecutors who adopted a more investigative approach to crime and criminal justice were more likely to prosecute violent crimes committed by criminal organizations.
Her work joins research by this year’s other Emerging Scholars on topics ranging from school shootings and interpersonal violence to displacement, prisons, domestic violence, and anti-minority violence.
The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation supports research on the causes, manifestations, and control of violence, with a particular emphasis on scholarship that can contribute to understanding and addressing pressing problems of violence around the world.
Ortiz-Ocaña is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame.