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Project: Measuring Messages About Race and Gender

Early influences that depress children’s beliefs about their own ability can lead to lower educational achievement and persistent disadvantage. In particular, receiving negative messages about gender- and race-specific levels of ability have played a role in generating disadvantage for women and minorities. Children are particularly vulnerable to negative messages about race and gender, as their beliefs about their own capacities are highly malleable.

This project aims to improve how we estimate the extent and implications of children’s exposure to race- and gender-coded messages. The initial goal of the project will be to develop, verify, apply, and disseminate new methods of human-directed, machine-implemented content analysis focused on measuring implicit messages about race and gender in visual content. We anticipate that the tools we develop will catalyze new research in fields such as computational science and social science, and will advance our understanding of the extent of these messages and their contribution to inequality.

Mentors: Anjali Adukia and Hakizumwami Birali Runesha

Anjali Adukia is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the College. In her work, she is interested in understanding how to reduce inequalities such that children from historically disadvantaged backgrounds have equal opportunities to fully develop their potential.  Her research is focused on understanding factors that motivate and shape behavior, preferences, attitudes, and educational decision-making, with a particular focus on early-life influences.  She examines how the provision of basic needs—such as safety, health, justice, and representation—can increase school participation and improve child outcomes in developing contexts.

Adukia completed her doctoral degree at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, with an academic focus on the economics of education. Her work has been funded from organizations such as the William T. Grant Foundation, the National Academy of Education, and the Spencer Foundation.  Her dissertation won awards from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM), Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP), and the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES). Adukia received recognition for her teaching from the University of Chicago Feminist Forum.  She completed her masters of education degrees in international education policy and higher education (administration, planning, and social policy) from Harvard University and her bachelor of science degree in molecular and integrative physiology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  She is a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a faculty affiliate of the University of Chicago Education Lab and Crime Lab.  She is on the editorial board of Education Finance and Policy.  She was formerly a board member of the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network – San Francisco Bay Area. She continues to work with non-governmental organizations internationally, such as UNICEF and Manav Sadhna in Gujarat, India.

Hakizumwami Birali Runesha is the Director of Research Computing for the University of Chicago, where he provides leadership and vision for advancing all aspects of research computing strategies at the University. He is responsible for the design, configuration, and administration of centrally managed High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems and related services across the University. In addition, he provides access to advanced technical expertise, user support, advice and training, and access to the University’s HPC facility to the research community.

Runesha is a seasoned professional who brings to the University of Chicago HPC management leadership and more than 17 years of experience in high performance computing and scientific software development. He earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in Civil engineering at Old Dominion University. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, he served as Director of Scientific Computing and Applications at the University of Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) managing the scientific computing, biological computing, visualization and application development groups. In addition to overseeing strategic planning of HPC resources and leading annual procurement of supercomputing resources at MSI, Runesha created the MSI Application software development group and the MSI Scientific Data Management Laboratory to meet the evolving data management and database development needs of university researchers. Prior to joining the University of Minnesota, he was a research scholar at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology developing parallel computing algorithms for engineering applications, a research associate for the Multidisciplinary Parallel-Vector Computer Center at Old Dominion University and an Assistant Professor at the University of Kinshasa.

Runesha has developed open source software programs and fast parallel solvers for large-scale finite element applications. He served as principal investigator on a number of research grants and is the author of a number of journal articles, proceedings and conference papers. He has given many invited talks, seminars, courses, and workshops on various HPC topics.

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