High School Summer Research Program Hosts Guest Speakers

The twenty-seven participants in IMD’s high school summer research program are hard at work collaborating with faculty mentors to dive deep into topics in math and democracy. Visits from guest speakers are a key part of the high school summer research program. This summer, we are lucky to have four incredible speakers sharing their expertise and advice with our students. 

Anna Haensch is a Research Associate Professor at the Data Science Institute at University of Wisconsin – Madison. Dr. Haensch works on a broad and evolving set of problems at the intersection of AI, policy, and society. She is especially excited by work that combines mathematical rigor with real-world impact — current projects span data center policy and the energy transition, optimal strategies and opinion dynamics in electoral systems, and connecting AI research to state and federal legislation.

Rachel Hutchinson is Senior Policy Analyst at FairVote, an organization working toward better elections and a more representative democracy. Alongside her work at FairVote in ranked choice voting (RCV) and proportional representation, her areas of research include primary elections, voter behavior, and political polarization.

Jahnavi Rao and Gabriela Gongora Rosales will represent New Voters, a youth-led organization that empowers high school students to be heard and prioritized in politics. Since Rao founded New Voters nine years ago as a high school club, the over 400 directors and interns have civically engaged tens of thousands of high school students through over 1,000 drives in high schools in forty-two states. New Voters has been recognized by the United Nations and featured in Teen Vogue, CNN, the Chronicle of Philanthropy, NBC News, Bloomberg, C-Span, HBO Max and Forbes.

We are so grateful to these speakers for sharing insights from their work with our high school researchers, and we look forward to the new ideas and questions that will arise from these conversations.