Saturday, Feb. 7, the College of William and Mary hosted its Charter Day Student Innovation Showcase in Tucker Hall.
The College’s Global Research Institute hosts the event annually to highlight student-led undergraduate research around campus.
Director of the GRI and George and Mary Hylton Professor of International Relations Mike Tierney ’87 began with brief remarks.
Tierney described the GRI’s purpose as enabling research collaboration between students and faculty. He believes most academic institutions undervalue the role that undergraduates can play in research.
“Most research universities in this country do not take the ideas of 18 and 19-year-olds seriously, and I think it’s a mistake,” Tierney said.
Tierny explained that students have led some of the GRI’s longest-running projects.
“When you look at the success of some of the projects that have persisted here at William and Mary, you’ll understand why it’s crazy not to listen to your students when they have ideas,” he said.
Tierney then passed the floor to Kelly Houck ’12, senior program manager of student initiatives at the GRI.
Houck outlined the event’s format.
Four student teams received five minutes to present and discuss their research.
After each group presented, a faculty panel provided feedback.Panel members included associate teaching professor Alexandra Joosse, Davison Douglas Professor of Law Margaret Hu and Nitya Labh ’22, the Schwarzman Academy Fellow for the International Security Programme at Chatham House.
The research groups then moved to breakout sessions where audience members could hear more about each of the projects.
Nathaniel Callabresi ’26, Akash Nayak ’27 and Sam Leong ’26 presented on behalf of DisinfoLab.
The students discussed one of their ongoing lab reports, related to studying the spread of misinformation and disinformation during natural disasters. DisinfoLab chose to examine the Palisades Fire in California, Hurricane Melissa in the Caribbean and Typhoon Ragasa in Southeast Asia.
“We chose these three case studies because they’re all particularly severe, recent and they cover multiple regions of the world,” Nayak said.
Nayak highlighted the goals of the current project.
“The idea is that the insights we gain from this research can inform practitioners as they respond to increasingly severe disasters for the world,” he said.
The next group to present was Promises and Pathways, a project under AidData. Its student-run research explores how Afghan migrants navigate the U.S. resettlement and integration process.
Tajalla Moslih ’27 and Zahra Rahimi ’28 presented on behalf of the group.
“Our first research question looks at how different types of U.S. visas affect the integration journey of Afghan migrants,” Moslih said.
Moslih said their second research question involves comparing and contrasting the experiences of Afghan migrants in legal limbo versus those in more secure pathways.
Promises and Pathways gathers its research data by interviewing many of these Afghan migrants and then coding the conversations to yield its experimental results.
Nolan Jansorn ’27 and Mareanne Zaiber ’26 presented on behalf of the Petro-Intelligence Project. The student-led research initiative focuses on the effects of artificial intelligence and technology on oil workers and migrant labor groups in the Middle East.
Jansorn and Zaiber discussed the reliance of the Gulf States on low-skilled migrant labor and how AI technologies are likely to uproot and automate many of these jobs.
Jansorn said the concern around this kind of automation is that it risks systematically disregarding millions of migrant workers under the changing global economy.
“This project aims to examine modern challenges that AI is posing as it becomes integrated within sectors that rely heavily on migrant labor,” Zaiber said. “We plan to focus heavily on the oil industry.”
Zaiber explained the Petro-Intelligence Project plans to conduct its research by developing a data set that tracks AI initiatives across the global economy, particularly as it relates to the oil sector.
The final research group to present was The GeoPolitics of Technology Initiative, a student-run project, in collaboration with the Yale Policy Institute and the GRI, focused on technology and policy research.
Kate Carline ’26, Vera Pande ’27 and Jack Keating ’26 presented on behalf of the Geo-Tech Initiative.
Keating discussed the group’s first research focus relating to Western economic competition with China. He described how the group’s work finds that as China has expanded its global economic output, the country has not developed its independent supply chains for critical industrial outputs.
“We have been developing a policy framework for how the United States and allies can leverage this [Chinese] dependency to mitigate conflict and build deterrence,” he said.
Pande discussed the other ongoing research focus of the Geo-Tech Initiative, which explores building and strengthening infrastructure for community-level scientific research and development.
“Community-grounded science should be treated as [supportive] public infrastructure,” Pande said. “In a period where funding and science are under attack, scientific legitimacy depends on enabling responsible participation at scale.”
