Staff

Pre-Doc Research Fellows

Research Assistants

Philip Butta
I started working with Professor Diermeier in summer 2010, helping him research business reputation management strategies.  The primary question I sought to answer was how do businesses respond when their brand is threatened by a public scandal?  What do they do in order to ameliorate the situation and maintain their customer base and profits?

The research projects I worked on contributed to a book of case studies Daniel has been compiling around this topic.

Senior, Medill

Brian Chen

I attended a work-study fair my freshman year. There, I met Louisa Egan, a post-doctorate research fellow at the Ford Center who was studying how people make rational decisions. More specifically, her work concerned zero-sum behavior and how it influenced business negotiations. Not only did her work intrigue me, but her work also involved both pre-schoolers and monkeys! 

I am currently a Junior at Northwestern studying Economics and International Studies. My vocational aspiration is to consult non-profit organizations and their policies regarding developmental work in the international arena -- ultimately, to help develop poor countries. As a research assistant at the Ford Center, I am able to not only develop my research, writing, and analytical skills, but also learn more about the role of business and its interaction with the social and political environment of society. Thus, I am able to get more insight into how corporations and other organizations can become global agents of change in the social, economic, and political arena.

Junior, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences

Katie Chen

I wanted to work at the Ford Center because of my interest in how corporations manage crises and why some succeed and others fail.  I also wanted to work somewhere that would further my knowledge of trends in the business world. 

As a journalism major, there are many different areas I can specialize in and business journalism is one area I'm considering.  At the Ford Center, I look at business news from a researcher's perspective which is extremely helpful in terms of understanding all angles and the major players of a story.

Will Kim

I am currently creating agent based models of mass organized behavior. Some of the topics include models of voting on different networks, the Ising model on networks, and Social Consensus models on different networks. We try to explain why and under which conditions a group of people display collective action, such as riots and voter turnout. Currently, I am working to create a library of such models. 

Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences