The new academic year has begun and with it come some new faces around SSRI. Kyle Endres, Jennifer Bowles and Mara Sedlins have recently joined the Institute as postdoctoral fellows, with Mara’s position an entirely new fellowship shared between SSRI and Duke University Libraries.
Kyle works jointly with the Duke Initiative on Survey Methodology (DISM) and SSRI, under the supervision of DISM Director and Professor of Political Science D. Sunshine Hillygus. He replaces Steve Snell in the position as Steve is now working with Qualtrics at their headquarters in Provo, Utah. Kyle will be teaching a series of workshops starting September 14 for those interested in survey research and methods. Visit the DISM site for more info and how to register.
Kyle recently completed his PhD in Government at The University of Texas at Austin, where he was a graduate student affiliate at the Irma Rangel Public Policy Institute. Prior to joining DISM and SSRI, Kyle was a predoctoral research fellow at The Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy at Fordham University.
Jennifer S. Bowles is the PARISS Postdoctoral Associate for the Initiative on Qualitative, Ethnographic, and Mixed Methods Research at SSRI. She’s also an adjunct instructor in the Sanford School of Public Policy. New to SSRI, but not Duke, she’s also served as a lecturing fellow in the Duke Thompson Writing Program where she taught interdisciplinary writing classes on law, anthropology, and social work.
Jennifer received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2015. She also holds a law degree from the University of Texas School of Law and an MSW from the University of Michigan School of Social Work. She’s spent over twenty years dedicated to social justice work, including advocating for low wage workers’ rights as a public interest lawyer in Washington, D.C. and working as a clinical social worker with people struggling with mental illness and addiction.
Mara Sedlins joins SSRI as a 2016-2018 Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) / Digital Library Federation (DLF) postdoctoral fellow in data curation in the social sciences. She is working with Duke University Libraries and SSRI to develop best practices for managing a variety of research data in the social sciences in this brand new postdoc position.
Mara earned her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Washington, where she developed a measure of automatic social categorization — that is, the degree to which people, automatically and without conscious awareness, group faces into discrete categories according to perceived age, gender, and race. During her time in Seattle, Mara also worked on several projects at Microsoft Research evaluating new technologies for workplace communication.
Originally posted on the Duke Social Science Research Institute website
