Five Penn State faculty members were recently named Social Science Research Institute (SSRI) Mentored Faculty Fellows for 2025-2026.
The SSRI Mentored Faculty Fellows Program supports the career development of Penn State early career faculty to train in a new area of research and/or to develop new interdisciplinary collaborations aimed at building sustainable research and securing external funding.
The 2025-2026 SSRI Fellows are:
Mook Bangalore, Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy, College of the Liberal Arts
With this fellowship, Bangalore plans to conduct new research on dam releases in Nigeria and neighboring Cameroon, which builds on current work on flood impacts in the region. Bangalore’s research will focus on flooding from dam releases, mapping their spatial and temporal distribution, and using available micro-data to examine the resultant impacts on population health, food security, and poverty.
Seong Ji Jeong, Assistant Professor of Workforce Education and Development, College of Education
With the rise of higher education and rapidly changing industrial needs, the education-job mismatch has been an emerging issue. Jeong’s research examines whether the education system mitigates wage penalties associated with education-job mismatches. This fellowship will allow her to further the understanding of the widening wage disparities caused by education-job mismatches across the education system, the labor market, and social mobility.
Nicole Kreisberg, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, College of the Liberal Arts
While much is known about housing, income, and wealth inequality among immigrants, there is considerably less knowledge on inequality among immigrants’ spouses. Kreisberg will explore how place of birth and legal status, as well as the gender of the “trailing spouse,” shape power and division of labor inside the household, as well as access to housing, income, and wealth outside the household.
Maggie Shum, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Penn State Behrend, School of Humanities and Social Science
The fellowship will support a project that examines how diaspora’s connection with homeland, integration into host countries, diasporic identity, and the threat of transnational repression shape their policy preference, civic engagement, and attitude toward politics “here” (host country) and “there” (homeland). The project will primarily focus on the case of the Hong Kong diaspora in six host countries (the UK, Canada, Australia, the US, Taiwan, and Japan), with a special focus on the impact of autocratization-driven migration reflected in the recent wave of immigrants.
Yubai Yuan, Assistant Professor of Statistics, Eberly College of Science
This fellowship aims to increase the understanding of social influence by identifying the causal effect of social influence on individual behavior and uncover the diffusion patterns and mechanisms of social influence. Yuan will develop methodologies and computational frameworks to identify and quantitatively analyze social influence within human networks.
Over the past 17 years, the SSRI Faculty Fellows Program has supported 59 faculty members from nine colleges and 23 departments and continues to make significant contributions to the institute’s research portfolio at Penn State. More information, including the application process, can be found at the SSRI Faculty Fellows program website.