Four U.T. Dallas Students Selected To Attend Prestigious Summer Program in England

Four students from The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) have been selected to attend the world-renowned Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis and Collection at the University of Essex in Colchester, England, this summer.

The four, all from UTD’s School of Social Sciences, are Percy Galimbertti and Christopher Rodgers, both students in the university’s Political Economy Ph.D. program, and Nontokozo Moyo and Nataliya Rubanenko, both students in the Master of Science in Applied Economics program.

The Summer School at Essex offers high-quality instruction in quantitative social science data analysis from world-class faculty members and provides a forum for interaction among social science faculty and students from many countries. To date, the school has attracted people from more than 90 countries in Western and Eastern Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, North America and South America.

The school opened in 1968 with the support of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The Nuffield Foundation, the Department of Government at the University of Essex and the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), whose membership once included countries in the European Union but now numbers more than 300 universities worldwide, including UTD, also have provided support for the program.

“This will be a great opportunity for each of the four students to learn something of major methodological and analytical value to the research projects that they are conducting,” said Dr. James Murdoch, dean of UTD’s School of Social Sciences.

Dr. Marianne Stewart, a professor in the School of Social Sciences and UTD’s representative to the ECRP, added, “The summer program also will allow them to learn about innovations and problems — and possibly to contribute to some real breakthroughs — in the use of social science research methodology around the world.”

Galimbertti will take a course in The Analysis of Textual Data: The Language of Politics; Moyo, a Survey Research Methods course; Rodgers, a course in Bayesian Methods for Social Science Data Analysis; and Rubanenko, a course called Maximum Likelihood and Limited Dependent Variable Models. Rodgers also will serve as an instructional assistant to Dr. Harold Clarke, Ashbel Smith Professor of Social Science at UTD, who teaches Time Series: Applications and Advances at Essex.