Eight graduate students from the University of Minnesota have been selected to participate in the Summer 2024 MnDRIVE Human in the Data Fellowship.

Fellows will receive $7,000 each to fund research on the humanistic implications of data and its use in one of the five MnDRIVE areas of concentration: robotics, global food, environment, brain conditions, or cancer clinical trials. Funded by MnDRIVE—Minnesota’s Discovery, Research, and InnoVation Economy—and administered in partnership by the Institute for Advanced Study, Research Computing, and Liberal Arts Technologies and Innovation Services (LATIS) at the University of Minnesota, this unique fellowship supports non-traditional scholarship and interdisciplinary engagement that might not normally fit within standard graduate research. 

MnDRIVE is a partnership between the University of Minnesota and the State of Minnesota that aligns areas of research strength with the state’s key and emerging industries to address grand challenges. Each Human in the Data Fellow’s work will relate to one of five MnDRIVE areas of concentration: robotics, global food, environment, brain conditions, or cancer clinical trials.

Over the course of the summer, fellows will convene in a bi-weekly working group to provide feedback, support, and community as their projects develop. Fellows will also have access to the computational resources of Research Computing, including consultations with staff from the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, the University of Minnesota Informatics Institute, and U-Spatial. Human in the Data Fellows with join the 2024-25 IAS Residential Fellows cohort to present the results of their work in the fall.

We look forward to working with this exciting cohort over the summer!

Summer 2024 Fellows

• Sarah Abdel-Jelil
  "Hollow Bodies"
  Art
  MnDRIVE Thematic Area: Environment
   
• Sonia Beltz
  "Our Stomping Grounds: Mapping Social and Environmental Realities in 1830s and 2000s Western New York"
  Creative Writing
  MnDRIVE Thematic Area: Environment
   
• Mohimarnab Biswas
  "Food, ruins and cinema in South Asia"
  Asian and Middle Eastern Studies
  MnDRIVE Thematic Area: Global Food
   
• Anna Clowser
  "Farm-Land: embodied knowledge as a way mapping small-scale farms in Minnesota and Northern Ireland"
  Art
  MnDRIVE Thematic Area: Global Food
   
• Kristen Reynolds
  "Toward a Black Speculative"
  American Studies
  MnDRIVE Thematic Area: Robotics
   
• Rongwei Rita Tang
  "Understanding People's Experience of Being Corrected"
  Hubbard School of Journalism & Mass Communication
  MnDRIVE Thematic Area: Global Food
   
• Hanzhang Ye
  "Building A Digital Nation: The Infrastructure for China’s Computing Industry"
  Program in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine
  MnDRIVE Thematic Area: Robotics
   
• Ali Yildirim
  "Whose Can (Life) Matters?: The Politics of Disaster Relief and Environmental Injustices in Turkey"
  Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies
  MnDRIVE Thematic Area: Environment