Back to Research and Publications Index
Two Penn State PhD students in political science have won competitive National Science Foundation Dissertation Awards.
September 1, 2007
Two Penn State political science students were awarded competitive awards to support their dissertation work from the National Science Foundation.
Kyle Joyce received support for his project entitled “Computational Modeling of War Expansion” (advisor: Scott Bennett) for the period of March 15, 2007 to March 15, 2008. Kyle’s project involves developing an agent-based model of war expansion, running computer simulations to derive the emergent behavioral patterns of third parties during ongoing wars, and then subjecting the behavioral patterns to empirical scrutiny using statistical analysis of historical data.
Phil Arena won an award for his project entitled “In It to Win It? Domestic Politics and Long Term Resolve in International Crises” (advisor: Glenn Palmer for the period of July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2008. Phil’s project explores the effect of domestic politics on the willingness of democratic states to bear the costs of prolonged conflict.