Hosted by the King Center on Global Development, this Research Roadmap will provide graduate students with practical guidance and creative methods on “doing more with less” in research. Graduate students in global development research often face uncertainty around funding and the challenge of advancing their work with limited resources. This panel will bring together Stanford faculty and researchers to share strategies for designing rigorous yet cost-effective research projects.

Sharing examples from their own research: Marshall Burke will discuss how satellite imagery can be combined with existing survey data to generate new insights; Arun Chandrasekhar will discuss approaches to efficient fieldwork design; and Duncan Lawrence will discuss an IPL-developed WhatsApp survey tool.

After the talk, join us for a 4:00 PM reception to network with peers and chat about your research at our Global Development Graduate Student Mixer—light refreshments will be served.

About the speakers:

Marshall Burke is a professor in the Global Environmental Policy unit in the Doerr School of Sustainability, deputy director at the Center on Food Security and the Environment, and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Woods Institute, and SIEPR at Stanford University. His research focuses on social and economic impacts of environmental change and on measuring and understanding economic development in emerging markets. His work has appeared in both economic and scientific journals, including recent publications in Nature, Science, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, and The Lancet.

Arun Chandrasekhar is a professor in the economics department at Stanford. He works on development economics and studies the role that social networks play in developing countries. He is particularly interested in how the economics of networks can help us understand information aggregation failures and the breakdown of cooperation in the developing world. His research approach is methodologically diverse, and includes novel data collection, field experiments, and observational data analysis.

Duncan Lawrence is the executive director of the Immigration Policy Lab (IPL) and a Senior Research Scholar at Stanford University. He also served as the founding executive director of IPL at Stanford from 2014-2022. He brings to IPL a wealth of diverse experience having worked directly with immigrants, nonprofits, and foundations in various roles from medical interpreter to researcher. Prior to joining IPL, he served as Senior Director of Innovation for the Resettlement, Asylum, and Integration department at the International Rescue Committee (IRC).