When Stanford University student Merry Seng Maran showed up to pitch an entrepreneurship program for refugees at the International Rescue Committee offices in Uganda this past summer, she thought she would be speaking one-on-one with the organization’s local director. Instead, learning of her meeting through word of mouth, more than 100 people showed up to hear what she had to say.

“I was not expecting it at all,” she says. “It was just me and my boda boda driver and there were so many people" – moms, dads, young people, everyone.”

Seng Maran’s job, as a King Center summer full-time undergraduate research fellow was to help increase enrollment for the program, which studies variables that might increase a startup’s chances for success and is part of a Stanford Management Science and Engineering research project and social impact endeavor run by Professor Charles Eesley and PhD candidate Zahra Hejrati.

Seng Maran and the team succeeded: By pursuing new and existing relationships with refugees and refugee organizations, and by opening the program to Ugandan nationals, the program grew from a little more than 200 participants in 2023 to about 1,200 in 2024.

Seng Maran’s experience is just one example of the myriad ways undergraduate students can engage with world-class research on issues related to global development through the King Center.

“It was a life-transforming experience,” says Seng Maran, who immigrated to the United States with her mother from Myanmar as a child, and hopes to work on similar issues in the future. “That was the event in my life that actually influenced what I’m thinking of doing post-grad.”

Empowering seaweed farmers in Indonesia

Kaylee Shen also had the chance to travel as part of her King Center summer research fellowship: Under the guidance of Professor David Cohen and in collaboration with the Indonesia Ocean Justice Initiative, she spent the summer in Indonesia studying how seaweed farmers share knowledge, manage farm operations, and access new market opportunities.

Seaweed farming, like many industries, is threatened by pollution and climate change.

“There’s a push to study seaweed farming and how we can socioeconomically empower seaweed farmers,” Shen explains.

Her work involved studying seaweed farmer Facebook groups, including one with 56,000 members, to analyze content and common themes among community members whose livelihoods affect more than one million coastal residents in Indonesia. Studying Indonesian seaweed farmers' use of social media can reveal their priorities and discussions, helping policymakers enhance digital empowerment initiatives for smallholder farmers.

“I’m looking at what people talk about and when and why,” she says. “My research is about how digital technologies can enable farmers to advocate for themselves better” in the future.

Using technology to glean lessons from the past

Emily Molins spent her summer fellowship conducting research of a more historical nature with King Center postdoctoral fellow Ashrakat Elshehawy, an expert in computational social sciences. Elshehawy uses natural language processing and machine learning to study questions of political economy.

“Dr. Elshehawy's work focuses on how we can use computational tools to study social phenomena like health, voter behavior, and policing – it all felt very timely,” Molins says.

The work involved testing computer vision technology, including training an algorithm to read the text of scanned documents. Among other topics, Elshehawy is analyzing the records of early 1900s primary school students in Egypt to see how the type of education they received affected their outcomes; and what German police reports from the mid-20th century can reveal about how law enforcement might treat immigrants differently than citizens.

Molins, who helped with writing code for the computer vision and natural language processing project, says the work helped drive home the importance of being “computationally savvy” in addressing social problems and questions.

“Having the confidence to be curious and ask questions – why not go dig around in Egyptian primary school data? If you don’t, who will? – I found that really beautiful,” she says. “What do we risk losing if we don’t try to digitize some of this data?”

Increased awareness and exposure

The King Center’s research opportunities for undergraduate students can lead to some high-profile exposure: Annabelle Smith, ’24, was a summer and academic year research fellow with the LaBeaud Lab, which studies infectious diseases. A paper she worked on during that time about exposure to dengue virus during pregnancy was recently published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

“Having the project culminate in a publication has deepened my understanding of the entire research process and taught me invaluable scientific communication skills that I will utilize in my future career,” says Smith, who now works at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

But the work can also help young scholars learn about new fields and opportunities.

Shen says her experience “opened me up to the whole world of global development” and also to the world of academia.

“I’m potentially interested in pursuing a PhD,” she says. “I had never considered it in the past, but, now that I’ve started doing research, it seems less impossible to me.”