Introducing the 2024-2025 IMD Fellows

We are excited to welcome Wellesley College students Arial Brookhart ‘27, Winnie Zhou ‘27, Presha Goel ‘27, Cianna Salvatora ‘25, and Leah Valentiner ‘26 as our 2024-2025 IMD fellows. With focuses across many fields of study, from data science and philosophy to mathematics and computer science, these students will learn about the mathematical underpinning of democratic processes such as voting, apportionment, districting, gerrymandering, and quantification of power. The fellows will work with IMD faculty to conduct research exploring the mathematics of politics. Learn more about their projects below.

Arial Brookhart and Winnie Zhou will try to use category theory to reframe certain foundational constructions and results from game theory, specifically simple games and weighted voting games. 

Presha Goel will study the relationship between apportionment methods that have been used in the U.S. to allocate seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and two popular multi-winner methods of seat apportionment used in many democracies around the world.

Cianna Salvatora will examine some common proportional representation systems and see how applicable they would be to the setting of the U.S. if we switched from single-winner to multi-winner districts. In particular, she will study the effects of such a change on the implementation of the Voting Rights Act and the distribution of legislative seats for minority populations.

Leah Valentiner will work on topological modeling of political systems, namely using simplicial complexes to capture coalition structures. She hopes to understand how attaching probabilities that certain coalitions will form might add richness to the topology of the resulting complexes.

For more background on the fellows and their interests, see the IMD website’s students page.