By Marzena Anna Adamczuk, Development Officer, Office of Sponsored Research, IIASA<\/em><\/p>\n
YSSP Fund recipients from 2011 to 2018<\/p><\/div>\n
The 27 fellows smiling at you from the photograph are all part of the IIASA global network of system thinkers thanks to the Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP) Fund. The YSSP Fund<\/a> accepts donations from the IIASA community and directs the proceeds to support young scholars who are not eligible to receive a stipend from an IIASA National Member Organization.<\/p>\n
The IIASA experience has had a profound influence on the lives of previous recipients, and has brought them closer to answering some of their most pertinent research questions. J. Luke Irwin<\/a> (2018 YSSP Fund), for example, was able to explore which jobs and skills are the least automation resilient<\/a> and how policymakers and academic institutions should address future unemployment caused by automation. Another previous beneficiary of the fund, Diana Erazo (2016 YSSP Fund), looked at the transmission dynamics of Chagas disease \u2013 one of the most neglected tropical diseases in Latin America \u2013 and the most efficient strategies to contain it.<\/p>\n
Many of our alumni donors are former YSSP fellows, who appreciate the impact the program has had on their careers. One of them is Petr Aven<\/a>, who was part of the first YSSP cohort in 1977 and still remembers this experience as the best time of his life. Some of our alumni, who were themselves recipients of the YSSP Fund scholarship, see it as their duty and privilege to give back. One of our most distinguished donors, Dr. Roger Levien<\/a>, former director of IIASA and the founder of the YSSP, hopes that his donations will help build a bridge between IIASA and Pardee RAND Graduate School<\/a>, of which he is an alumnus as well. The motivation behind our most recent pledge from Professors Jyoti and Kirit Parikh<\/a> is to expose young minds to systems analysis and to promote research-based policymaking.<\/p>\n
Speaking of successes, Gbemi Samuel (2017 YSSP Fund), the first Nigerian to ever participate in the program has recently published a well-received article in the Journal of African Population Studies<\/em> describing her research<\/a> on estimating how many children under five could be prevented from dying if women in Nigeria used cleaner fuels to cook their family meals. Lu Liu, a 2016 YSSP Fund recipient published her first-authored paper<\/a> in Environmental Research Letters<\/em> and had a poster presentation<\/a> at the AGU Fall Meeting in Washington D.C. We are also very proud of Zhimin Mao\u2019s<\/a> (2015 YSSP Fund) post-IIASA career, starting from her IIASA Peccei Award<\/a> in 2015 and leading up to her current position at the World Bank. We can hardly wait to boast about the successes and accomplishments of our 2018 YSSP Fund fellows and hope they will stay in touch.<\/p>\n