Dissertation Fellowships Awarded 2004-2006

• Lalaie Ameeriar (Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Stanford University)
  Making Globalization Work: Foreign-Trained Technical Workers Entering the Canadian Workforce
  Academic Advisors: Professors Akhil Gupta and Renato Rosaldo
  Ameeriar's project focuses on the recruitment of South Asian science and engineering professionals. While her work is based heavily on fieldwork in Canada, it has implications for the United States and other nations that have turned heavily to developing nations for much of the growth in their scientific workforces. Canada has put a big stress on continuing education for foreign-trained professionals, but she is finding that many of the programs are dedicated to helping skilled workers to attain cultural citizenship and fitting in with the new community. Using her knowledge of Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu languages, she has carried out in-depth interviews with many immigrant science workers. Her academic advisor notes that many of these workers have high levels of technical skill, but some firms and clients resist hiring or promoting them because of cultural differences: "An approach that focuses on skill as merely a technical affair misses the importance of abilities that make skills useful and employable."
  
  
• Kjersten Clare Bunker (Department of Sociology, Stanford University)
  Employment Sectors as Opportunity Structures: The Effects of Location on Male and Female Scientific Dissemination
  Academic Advisors: Walter Powell and Cecilia Ridgeway
  In her proposal, Kjersten Bunker notes that female scholars have lower rates of patents and publication than their male counterparts. She then responds:
  Research on gender differences in dissemination, however, rarely includes measures sensitive to the organizational context of scientific work. Previous research on gendered productivity has concentrated primarily on the academic realm, and often only with regard to dissemination through publishing. But scientific careers outside the academy are becoming more common, and growth in university-industry relations has increased academic involvement in commercial ventures. Assessing the effects of organizational context on multiple forms of dissemination is of great importance as scholars begin to sort out the contemporary pushes, pulls, and constraints operating on the female scientist in an era where commercial and academic science are closely intertwined.
  Bunker seeks "to formulate a theory of employment sectors as opportunity structures for increasing or decreasing dissemination activity (and disparities) among male and female scientists." She will also be contributing to the SEWP conference on under-represented groups in the sciences, and we hope her project will give new insights into gender disparities in the sciences.
  [visualization of collaboration network]
  
  
• Sangjoon Lee (Department of Economics, State University of New York at Buffalo)
  Productivity of Research Scientists over Life Cycle, Mobility and Productivity in Innovation by Firm Size
  Academic Advisors: Jinyoung Kim and Michael Gort
  Lee's work looks at "inter-firm technological spillovers by labor mobility." He has found many differences in the pharmaceutical and semiconductor industries. He is investigating "the effect of a scientist's employment change on the scientistss own productivity, on the productivity of the scientists in the firms the scientists left, and on the productivity of the scientists in the firms the scientist joined." He wants to know "whether it is more productive scientists that move, and how the age of a scientist affects the likelihood of moving." Finally, he will turn to that question posed by earlier social scientists: "why are small firms seemingly more innovative?"
  
  
• Cyrus Mody (Department of Science & Technology Studies, Cornell University)
  Scanning Probe Microscopy: The Genesis and Development of a Laboratory Artifact
  Academic Advisors: Michael Lynch and Trevor Pinch
  Mody's work is a history of modern and contemporary "microscopes as a lens for illustrating several issues: how scientists are trained; how they integrate new technologies into ongoing work; how they construct, maintain, and tailor disciplinary boundaries; how they make trans-disciplinary alliances; and how laboratory instrumentation is negotiated between its users and manufacturers."
  In addition, "surface science is one of the postwar umbrella disciplines -- like materials science or information science -- that precipitated in the Cold War at the boundary of industry, government, and academia. These fields are the forebears of new models of interdisciplinary work (in, for example, biotechnology and nanotechnology), yet historians and sociologists of science are only just beginning to examine them."
  
  
• Nidhi Thakur (Department of Economics, University of Arizona)
  Essays on the Varied Roles of R&D and the Mobility of Skilled Labor in the Knowledge-Based Economy
  Academic Advisors: Ronald Oaxaca and Price V. Fishback
  Thakur's work takes up three issues: 1) R&D spending and patent productivity in the software industry; 2) R&D spending and the production of engineers; and 3) how much mobility do engineers have in switching to different engineering sub-fields.
  
  
• Charles N. Yood (Department of History, Pennsylvania State University)
  Servicing Science: Scientific Computing at Argonne National Laboratory
  Academic Advisors: Robert Proctor and Gary Cross
  Yood is examining the role of national laboratories in the development of computational tools and techniques and how this has transformed several scientific disciplines and enterprises. It seeks to show how national priorities and the continuing needs of nuclear science research affect other disciplines. Yood's work will help the Science & Engineering Workforce Project understand the place of national laboratories in the development of several scientific fields. His advisor, historian Robert Proctor, points out that "several fields of biology.... will now just as soon hire someone with a supercomputing background (i.e., for computational genomics) as from a more traditional field of biology."