Research at the Mobilization and Political Economy REU at Pitt

In this program, I prepared a research design under the mentorship of my advisor Professor Fernando Tormos-Aponte, an Environmental Sociologist Scholar and fellow Caribbean Climate Change activist. As an Environmental Studies and Economics double major, I was inspired to pursue a topic focused on the intersection of environmental justice and political economy. My project centered on examining how voter turnout in disadvantaged Texas communities shaped the allocation of disaster recovery aid following Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

Although I had never taken a statistics course before, I embraced the challenge of using quantitative methods to analyze electoral data, social vulnerability indicators, federal aid, and hurricane damage to explore potential correlations between vulnerability, voter turnout, and disaster aid. I presented my preliminary findings, in which regressions suggested that higher voter turnout in predominantly Black and low-income communities was linked to greater disaster aid compared to less disadvantaged areas.