Announcing the 2019-2020 PON Graduate Research Fellows

By — on / Awards, Grants, and Fellowships, Graduate Research Fellowships, PON Graduate Research Fellowships

The Program on Negotiation Graduate Research Fellowships are designed to encourage young scholars from the social sciences and professional disciplines to pursue theoretical, empirical, and/or applied research in negotiation and dispute resolution. Consistent with PON’s goal of fostering the development of the next generation of scholars, this program provides support for one year of dissertation research and writing in negotiation and related topics in dispute resolution, as well as giving fellows an opportunity to immerse themselves in the diverse array of resources available at PON.

We are very excited to have four new fellows joining us this fall:

Aria Ritz Finkelstein
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT

Aria Ritz Finkelstein is a Ph.D. Candidate at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies
and Planning and a Guest Student in Marine Policy at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Her dissertation focuses on the negotiations leading towards an international legally binding instrument governing the uses of biodiversity on the high seas. As a PON fellow, she will draw from negotiations theory to understand how the ambiguity of terms like “biodiversity” either facilitate or inhibit agreement throughout international mapping workshops and meetings. Aria holds an M.S. in Urban Design and an M.Arch. from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a B.A. in English from the University of Georgia. At MIT, she has been a course instructor and a teaching assistant for undergraduate and graduate courses in planning and design, and she has researched the politics of landscape planning in both arid and marine environments. Before returning to academia, she worked as an urban designer, facilitating planning processes and developing plans for communities around Georgia.

Rob Grace
Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, Brown University

Rob Grace is a PhD student in Political Science at Brown University. His research focuses on the politics of humanitarian action, with a particular emphasis on humanitarian access obstruction. His dissertation examines how and why international humanitarian actors sometimes succeed, and sometimes fall short, in their efforts to effectively negotiate humanitarian access during armed conflicts. He is a Senior Associate at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) and a researcher and affiliated fellow at the Humanitarian Innovation Initiative, based at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. He also co-teaches a graduate course on the politics of international emergency response at The Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University. His writing has been published by the Journal of Conflict & Security Law, World Health & Population, the European Society of International Law, Professionals in Humanitarian Assistance and Protection, the Foreign Policy Association, and Foreign Policy in Focus. Rob holds an MA in Politics from New York University and a BA from Vassar College.

Fady Khoury
S.J.D. Candidate, Harvard Law School

Fady Khoury is an S.J.D candidate at Harvard Law School. His research interests include Comparative Constitutional Law, Human Rights, and the intersection between Law, Society and Politics. Fady’s dissertation explores constitutional law and design in deeply divided societies. As a PON fellow, Fady will continue his dissertation research examining the potential utilization of constitutional law, power-sharing strategies and federal arrangements as conflict resolution and peace-building tools in deeply divided societies, with a special focus on Belgium, Lebanon, Northern Ireland and Palestine-Israel, exploring, both descriptively and normatively, the design and functions of the judicial branch within power-sharing political systems. Fady holds a Bachelor of Laws from Haifa University. Before Harvard Law School, Fady worked as a civil rights attorney at Adalah – the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.

Samantha Lakin
Ph.D. Candidate, Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University

Samantha Lakin, M.A., is an advanced doctoral candidate at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. Her dissertation is titled, “Kwibuka: Divergent Memory and the Quest for Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda.” Lakin’s research aims to contribute to the study of symbolic and holistic transitional justice. She worked to found the Department of Research, Policy, and Higher Education at Aegis Trust and the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda and also served as a community consultant for the Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Preservation with the U.S. Embassy in Rwanda, a Team Lead on action-based research about gender and corruption in Lubumbashi, DRC, and a research contractor in Northern Uganda, Ethiopia, and Nigeria. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Rwanda and Switzerland and served as a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Research and Dialogue for Peace in Kigali. Lakin holds an M.A. in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School at Tufts University, and a B.A. from Brandeis University.

Click here for additional information about our Graduate Research Fellowship program.

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