The Center for Social Science Innovation (CSSI) is pleased to announce the researchers selected for its annual Researcher-in-Residence summer program.
This program provides chosen faculty and scientific staff with the time, space, and resources to conduct high-impact social science research.
To advance their research project forward, participants are provided with quiet, dedicated office workspaces, funding, and CSSI staff support. Participants can spend their time on any element of the research process, including grant development, data collection or curation, manuscript writing, and dissemination.
The program also builds in weekly accountability meetings and workshops, offering the researchers additional expertise from CSSI staff and University of Iowa leaders on how to effectively fund, sustain, and broadcast their research.
“The Researcher-in-Residence summer program provides researchers with critical structure and resources to support their research over the summer months,” says Mark Berg, CSSI director. “This year’s researchers are tackling important social science issues, including transportation, AI, and occupational burnout, and I am excited to see how the program benefits their scholarly work.”
Meet this summer’s Researcher-in-Residence program participants, who come from three different colleges.
Graduate College
Bogdan Kapatsila, assistant professor in the School of Planning and Public Affairs, will spend the summer investigating the effects of the free transit fare pilot in Iowa City. The study relies on the natural experiment that the regional transit system offers. While the university’s CAMBUS has been free for decades, and the Coralville Transit continues to charge $1 per ride, the Iowa City Transit went fare-free in August 2023. To understand the impact of this transition, Kapatsila will analyze ridership, rider satisfaction, and safety for all three transit agencies before and after Iowa City Transit introduced the free fare. Kapatsila plans to present his findings in a peer-reviewed journal, as well as to the leadership of all three transit agencies in the region.
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Sang Jung Kim, assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, will explore how local journalists feel about the use of generative AI tools in visual storytelling. While some journalists have already expressed fears that AI will undermine journalistic principles like objectivity, others see the technology as a potential multifaceted aid. Kim will spend the program capturing this tension, as she conducts focus groups with Iowa-based journalists to assess their perceptions and perspectives on AI-driven visual storytelling. After transcribing and analyzing the data with the support of CSSI’s research services and multimethodology team, Kim hopes to craft both a peer-reviewed journal and a public-facing essay about her research.
College of Education
Ashley Rila, clinical assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, will examine the experiences of burnout for school paraprofessionals, individuals who help support the individualized academic and behavioral needs of students in schools. Rila has already collected and analyzed both quantitative and qualitative data on paraprofessionals’ self-reported levels and experiences of burnout. Next, Rila plans to use the program’s resources to begin writing a peer-reviewed manuscript for the project.
Learn More
The program will run for five weeks from Monday, June 16th to Friday, July 18th.
Last summer’s RiR participants used the program’s resources to conduct life history interviews with individuals who experienced sexual victimization while incarcerated and to develop a grant proposal aimed at understanding the financial and social insecurities of Social Work master’s students.
Applications for next summer’s Researcher-in-Residence program will open in the winter of 2026.
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