Horowitz foundation awards grants to 20 scholars for social policy research.

May 31, 2025, New Brunswick, NJ –The Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy has selected twenty scholars to receive research grants in the social sciences for the 2024-2025 award year. Those receiving awards, their research topics, and the institutions with which they are affiliated are listed at the end of this announcement.

“This year we received 501 applications” said Ayse Akincigil. “The awards are competitive: the twenty applicants who are receiving awards this year represent less than four percent of those who applied. Although many of the proposals were on topics of social and political importance, the Foundation’s Trustees consider these proposals to be particularly strong, and vibrant examples of how policy research can help meet the challenges of today’s complex society.”

About the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy

Established in 1997, the Horowitz Foundation issued its first awards in 1999. Awards are granted for policy-related research in all major areas of the social sciences. Only doctoral students whose dissertation proposals have been approved by their committees are eligible to apply. Awards are approved solely on merit, and are not allocated so as to ensure a representative base of disciplines. Applicants need not be citizens of the United States, and grants are not restricted to U.S. residents.

2025 Horowitz Foundation Award Recipients

Sukriti Beniwal, Georgia State University

• Who Delivers? Midwives & Maternal Outcome in Medicaid

Ayelet Carmeli, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Varieties of Financial Citizenship: Welfare States and Savings Regimes

Liliana Sierra Castillo, University of California Santa Barbara

• Displaced by the Blue Economy: Social-Ecological Impacts on Coastal Communities in Honduras

Emily Elizabeth Dobson, University of Maryland

• How Cash for Parents Becomes Opportunity for Kids: Examining Spending of the Child Tax Credit

Annika Gompers, Emory University

• Identifying Multilevel Determinants of Racial and Gender Inequities in Access to Kidney Transplantation in the US to Inform Interventions and Policies

Joseph Hnath, Harvard University

• Irving Louis Horowitz Award
• Default Health Insurance Choices and Managed Care for High-Need Populations

Matthew Jacob, Harvard University

• After the Crisis: Foreclosure's Lasting Impact on American Families 

Donghwan Ki, Ohio State University

• Toward Inclusive Planning: An In-Depth Investigation of Walkability in Minority Neighborhoods Using Generative AI and Street View Images

Noah Kouchekinia, University of California

• Inclusionary Zoning and the Supply of Affordable Housing: Evidence from California Localities

Elizabeth Krause, University of Kentucky

• The Effect of LARC on Birth Spacing and Infant Health: Evidence from Changes in the Medicaid Payment Structure

Lillian Leung, Princeton University

• Where the Other Half Lives: How Neighborhoods Matter to Immigrant Housing Outcomes

Zikai Li, University of Chicago

• Building Climate Coalitions: Social Equity Provisions and the Green Transition in the United States

Audrey Pereira, University of North Carolina

• Economic Stress, Youth Relationships, and Partner Violence: Evidence from the Malawi Social Cash Transfer Program

Guy Pincus, London Business School

• Trustees’ Award
• Wildlife & Conflicts: the Unintended Consequences of Biodiversity Protection Policies

Christina Plakas, University of South Carolina

• Access to Justice Behind Bars: A Mixed-Methods Study Defining and Measuring Meaningful Access to the Courts in U.S. Jails

Aarushi Shah, Columbia University

• Crime and Replenishment? An Ethnographic Study of the Remedial Work of an Urban New York Domestic Violence Court

Rohen Shah, University of Chicago

• When the Student Becomes the Master: A Field Experiment on Learning by Teaching

Aditya Srinivasan, Syracuse University

• Imagining Infrastructure: The Past and Future of Interstate 81

Dorit Talia Stein, Harvard University

• Modeling Health and Financial Risk Protection Impacts of National Health Insurance in Uganda

Nagisa Tadjfar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Screening or Exclusion? Reduced standardized testing and academic mismatch

The 2025-2026 Horowitz Foundation award application will open on July 1, and it will be available to individuals that have not previously applied.

For additional information, including a list of previous recipients, check out our website: www.horowitz-foundation.org