Recognizing our 2019-2020 Rothrock Fellows
Outstanding College of Liberal Arts faculty members were honored with a prestigious fellowship.
Outstanding College of Liberal Arts faculty members were honored with a prestigious fellowship.
Among those honored were the two 2019-2020 Ray A. Rothrock ’77 Fellows and one 2019-2020 Ray A. Rothrock ‘77 Senior Fellow. The Rothrock Fellows Program in Liberal Arts was established in 2006 with a significant grant from Ray A. Rothrock ’77 and recognizes newly-promoted, highly-recommended faculty members each year. Recipients of this award are known as Rothrock Fellows.
Fellows receive $15,000 over the next three years to encourage and support the completion of exceptional post-promotion projects and outstanding teaching.
Jason Lindo
Jason Lindo. Photo: provided.
Professor in the Department of Economics, Jason Lindo’s research is primarily focused on children and young adults, with an emphasis on health and education. He is interested in researching the effects of change in access to reproductive health care. He is the College of Liberal Arts’ 2019-2020 Senior Rothrock Fellow.
“Much of my recent work has examined the effects of policy changes affecting such access, including the Colorado Family Planning Initiative which dramatically expanded access to long-acting-reversible contraception through public clinics,” he said.
The Rothrock Fellowship will afford him the opportunity to jump-start his research interests. He plans to document the degree to which reproductive health care is accessible across the United States, to track how access is changing, and how changes in access are affecting health and economic outcomes.
According to Lindo, he is passionate about this area because reproductive health care is relevant to everyone: individuals’ health, their families, and their economic outcomes.
“I’m a strong believer that academics should be engaged with the non-academic community, providing and communicating the results of rigorous research to policymakers and the general public,” said Lindo.
Lindo says he is honored to be named a Senior Rothrock Fellow, which will allow him to continue to bring prominence to the College of Liberal Arts.
“One of the things about the College of Liberal Arts that makes me happy is increasing attention to the value of ‘outreach,’” Lindo said.
Andrew Barr
Andrew Barr. Photo: provided.
Associate professor in the Department of Economics, Andrew Barr, researches the role of financial and informational factors in the college decisions and related labor market outcomes of non-traditional students.
Barr’s research is personal to him. About one in five children in the United States grow up in poverty. These children are less likely to obtain benchmarks of lifetime economic or social success.
The Rothrock Fellowship will allow him to fund a graduate research assistant to assist with an ongoing research project on the long-run effects of income provided to low-income families during the child’s first year of life.
Barr’s research will trace the effects of income across the life course, exploring effects on test scores, educational attainment, and earnings. His “natural experiment” approximates the effect of randomly giving a low-income family an additional one to two thousand dollars after the birth of a first child.
Hopefully, it will answer questions about how the family spends the money. “For example, does the additional income provide a buffer that allows families to avoid adverse outcomes such as eviction or bankruptcy?” Barr said.
Barr is fortunate to be recognized as a Rothrock Fellow.
“I’m fortunate to have a job that I love that also has the capacity to improve people’s lives, both on and off-campus. I appreciate the College of Liberal Arts and Texas A&M University for caring about these things and providing me with the opportunity to contribute.”
Dinah Hannaford
Dinah Hannaford. Photo: provided.
The Rothrock Fellowship helps Hannaford continue her current book project, Aid and the Help: International Development and Domestic Work. Dinah Hannaford, associate professor with the Department of International Studies, researches important interventions into how we think about global hierarchies of power and privilege, the meaning of help and care, and limits and opportunities of international cooperation.
“The funding will allow me to complete the ethnographic and archival fieldwork for this project,” Hannaford said.
She believes that her work will help illuminate critically important realities about the racial, gendered and class aspects of development work in examining workplace dynamics.
Hannaford said that being a Rothrock Fellow is a tremendous honor and feels like a vote of confidence in her potential to make important contributions to her scholarly field and the College of Liberal Arts.
“I am pleased to be a part of the College of Liberal Arts, where students learn to read widely, write cogently and think critically across multiple disciplines. A liberal arts education equips students with a set of tools to tackle the meaningful questions and urgent challenges of human existence.”