Connecting Science to Policy – Three Years of MDI’s Research Experience for Undergraduates Program

By: Rebecca Vanarsdall, MDI Research Manager

Our MDI Summer Research Showcase on August 1st, marked the end of the final year of the Department of Computer Science and MDI’s Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program “Connecting Science to Policy: From Formal Computer Science Education to Real World Data Science Research to Policy Decision Making”. An annual eight-week in-person summer research program, undergraduate students from across the country worked alongside the Georgetown University research team applying computer science and data science methods to interdisciplinary research with real-world public policy impacts. 

Why Undergraduate Research?

The National Science Foundation’s Research Experience for Undergraduates program was formed in 1987 and has provided thousands of students with hands-on research experience, working with faculty across a range of disciplines, including ecology, demography, physics, and mathematics. In many cases, research opportunities are not available to undergraduate students at their home university; REU programs around the country are designed to give students a comprehensive experiential research opportunity. Particularly for undergraduates considering pursuing PhD programs, these experiences shed insights into a career in research. 

A 2019 Computing Research Association survey found that students who participated in REUs were more likely to pursue graduate school than their peers who did not participate in an REU. These experiences can also be pivotal for students whether or not they pursue graduate school or a career in research. Undergraduate research experience participants tend to report improvements in leadership skills, including communications, critical thinking, and collaboration.

Building on the MDI Scholars program and MDI’s mission of training the next generation of scholars and practitioners, MDI’s REU program was a natural fit to design and offer experiential learning opportunities to help train the next generation of scholars and practitioners. Since MDI launched the REU program in 2023, each year of the program has focused on a specific research topic that MDI faculty engage in: forced migration, election dynamics, and gun policy. This program aimed not only to teach students about computer science research but to help them understand how researchers in other disciplines use computer science algorithms and data science tools to generate evidence for developing public policy.

Three Years of Undergraduate Research

In the first two years of this program, we trained 21 students from 15 universities across the country. Students developed different machine learning models using data from different social media sites to evaluate important policy-related topics: forced migration and election dynamics. Each summer, students learned how researchers in other disciplines use computer science algorithms and data science tools to generate evidence for developing public policy and presented their work to policymakers, NGOs, and industry experts. After the summer, the majority of students from each cohort chose to continue in a fall hybrid extension program where they co-authored an academic paper about their research. Papers from both cohorts were submitted to academic venues. In our post-program surveys, we found that our students had significant improvements in their self-reported abilities to collect data or conduct experiments, their self-reported proficiencies in presenting research, and their agreement that they “feel welcomed in computing”. 

Due to an early termination of NSF funding, the third year of this program was run with financial support from multiple Georgetown institutes, including the Gender + Justice Initiative, Tech & Public Policy, the Fritz Family Fellowship, the Regents STEM Scholars Program, the McCourt School of Public Policy, the Department of Computer Science, and the Massive Data Institute. Thanks to this funding, 12 students from across the country came to Georgetown University to conduct opinion-modeling research on firearms policies. In addition to their research, the 2025 MDI REU cohort toured the US Capitol, participated in MDI’s Save the Data and Wikipedia Edit-a-thon events, and presented their work to gun violence researchers. Overall, in three years, 33 students from 26 universities in 16 states engaged in interdisciplinary research at Georgetown University, many of whom plan on pursuing a career in research, data science, computer science, or public policy.

Acknowledgements:

This program was conducted at the McCourt School’s Massive Data Institute at Georgetown University with support from the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program (award number 2244271), the Gender + Justice Initiative, Tech & Public Policy, the Fritz Family Fellowship, the Regents STEM Scholars Program, the McCourt School of Public Policy, the department of Computer Science, McBride Professor Mahe Velauthapillai and Professor Lisa Singh.