Graduating Seniors Showcase Research Excellence

Their research, taking first-place honors in two categories, examined the tides of Congress’ environmental policy, policing’s role change between drug enforcement and harm reduction, state-level predictive AI dashboards for overdose prevention, and environmental nonprofits and litigation.

Lila Kenney earned first place in the Society, Commerce and Behavior category for her project, “Legislative Landscapes: Unveiling Environmental Agendas through Congressional Speech Networks.” Her mentor was Professor Janet Box-Steffensmeier, political science.

Utilizing congressional one-minute speeches from the 104th to the 115th Congress, she analyzed congressional speech networks through an environmental policy lens.

“My research involves depicting the existing, underlying relationships between congresspeople through discursive trends and analysis, as well as the topic change of environmental keywords over time. Analyzing environmental congressional speech networks illuminates the relationships shared by some of the most influential members in American politics,” Kenney said. “Followers and leaders can be identified, communities involved in a particular topic may be discerned, and topic speech patterns may be discovered. With one-minute speeches recognized for their agenda-setting power, these networks may predict the tides of Congress’ environmental policy.”

This work highlights how informal environmental speech networks reflect emerging coalitions in Congress, with implications for agenda-setting.

Ejuan Kendrick took first place in the Center for Ethics and Human Values category. He was mentored on his project, “The Policing Pendulum: Role Change Between Drug Enforcement and Harm Reduction,” by Assistant Professor Tasha Perdue.

“This study examines how police officers understand their evolving roles as policing shifts from primarily enforcement-based approaches toward responsibilities that increasingly involve social service functions,” Kendrick said. “It explores how these changes intersect with drug use, the overdose epidemic and broader public health–oriented responses to substance use, while analyzing officers’ perspectives on their interactions with community members, policymakers and advocacy groups. The study identifies gaps in understanding and examines how these shifts influence perceptions of police performance, effectiveness and legitimacy.”

This study contributes to a deeper understanding of how evolving policy environments, drug-related crises and social movements shape police officers’ perceptions of their roles and responsibilities. By examining qualitative accounts from law enforcement officers operating in overdose-impacted communities, the research highlights the importance of communication, role adaptation and institutional context in influencing policing practices and public perceptions of police performance and legitimacy.

Morgan Persuit presented her project, “Evaluating State-Level Predictive AI Dashboards for Overdose Prevention: A Comparative Policy Analysis.” Her mentor was Professor Neal Hooker.

She studied artificial intelligence and machine learning-based predictive analytics tools to guide overdose prevention efforts that, while promising efficiency and improved targeting, raise concerns about transparency, algorithmic bias, privacy and accountability without a comprehensive evaluation framework.

Preliminary results support the assumption that states exhibit highly variable regulation, transparency and deployment of predictive overdose dashboards. A comparative landscape scan of Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Pennsylvania revealed consistent disclosure of data sources and representativeness but major gaps in update frequency, public documentation and predictive model transparency.A supplemental national scan of five additional states found similar inconsistencies, including limited sub-state geographic granularity and uneven inclusion of equity indicators.

The findings suggest the absence of a nationally consistent standard for predictive public health dashboards, underscoring the need for clearer governance and reporting frameworks.

Cordelia Van der Veer presented “Who Sues and Why: Environmental Nonprofits and Litigation,” with mentoring from Associate Professor Megan LePere-Schloop.

Because institutional features and partisan polarization make legislative progress on environmental policy difficult, environmental nonprofits use the courts, exploiting the citizen suit provisions of environmental regulations, to shape environmental protections. However, little is known about the organizations involved in these legal disputes.

Van der Veer investigated questions including how litigation involvement varies across different environmental nonprofits’ mission themes; the association between organizational capacity/resources of environmental nonprofits and involvement in litigation; and the relationship between resources and litigation involvement.

She concluded that environmental nonprofits are an important part of the environmental litigation landscape because they are the primary pro-regulatory plaintiffs. However, these groups do not represent all environmental issues or geographies equally. Analyzing the plaintiff data reveals trends that help researchers and policy practitioners understand factors contributing to the production of environmental inequality in the United States.