Sirui Wan, postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Psychology, has been named a 2024 AVDF/ACLS Fellow for Research on the Liberal Arts. The grant is administered by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and made possible through a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations (AVDF).
Wan has been recognized as one of four awardees, who will each receive up to $45,000 toward their projects and will participate in a two-day data training led by the research team at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan. Fellows will also convene for an in-person symposium in Summer 2025 to share their findings. The fellowships were awarded after a rigorous, interdisciplinary peer review process and are therefore a testament to the excellence of the selected projects.
Wan’s research explores the patterns of students switching fields of study at college, and how these patterns predict students’ short-term outcomes such as graduation, as well as students’ long-term outcomes such as well-being and earnings 10 years after graduation. It also examines whether these patterns differ by the gender, race, and/or social class of students.
The ACLS is a nonprofit federation of 81 scholarly organizations. As the leading representative of American scholarship in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, ACLS upholds the core principle that knowledge is a public good. In supporting its member organizations, ACLS utilizes its endowment and $37 million annual operating budget to expand the forms, content, and flow of scholarly knowledge.
The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations were established in 1952 based on the estate of entrepreneur Arthur Vining Davis. They are intended to honor and perpetuate his ambitious philanthropic vision. Since their inception, the foundations have awarded over 4,600 grants totaling more than $385 million to colleges, universities, hospitals and medical schools, among others.
Congratulations, Dr. Wan!