The Institute for Public Leadership at the School of Public Policy recognized its 2025 Seed Grant and Summer Doctoral Research Fellowship recipients, highlighting faculty and doctoral students whose work reflects its mission to strengthen public leadership across policy domains, communities and institutions.
The IPL Seed Grant Program was established to accelerate emerging scholarship and provides early-stage funding to faculty pursuing innovative research with the potential to influence public policy and practice. These grants are awarded to research proposals addressing critical questions relevant to public leadership in various contexts, with a particular emphasis on applied public leadership within the state of Maryland.
The IPL Summer Doctoral Research Fellowship offers dedicated support for doctoral students conducting dissertation-related and other types of research that advance understanding of public leadership. Each fellowship recipient receives a $5,000 grant to support their summer research endeavors.
These programs cultivate a cross-campus community of scholars working to deepen knowledge and generate solutions to today’s most pressing challenges. “It is hard to identify a public problem that does not magnify the importance of public leadership,” said Cullen Merritt, IPL research director. “Across all of these projects, it is clear that leadership matters and that faculty and students supported by IPL are uniquely skilled and committed to producing research that shows precisely how it matters.”
2025 IPL Seed Grant Recipients
Six seed grant awardees were selected from five academic units across the university, demonstrating the breadth of disciplines contributing to public leadership research at Maryland.
Brandy Espinola MPP ’15
School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
Espinola’s project advances research on environmental governance and community resilience, focusing on how local leadership models can drive sustainable climate and energy solutions.
Veronica Kang
College of Education
Kang’s initiative, EMBRACE-MD, brings together UMD students, public school teachers and families of individuals with disabilities to strengthen community-led advocacy and improve access to education and support services across Maryland.
Demar Lewis
College of Behavioral and Social Sciences
Lewis’s study examines how Black Americans perceive and evaluate community safety alternatives such as 211, 311, 988 and 911, with a national survey experiment designed to inform crisis-response policy and public leadership practices.
Minoo Modaresnezhad
Robert H. Smith School of Business
Modaresnezhad’s work uses physics-informed neural networks to build a predictive model that can help Maryland child welfare agencies assess and prevent the recurrence of child abuse and neglect, offering a powerful tool for leaders making complex, high-stakes decisions.
Christine Neumerski
College of Education
Neumerski’s project explores leadership practices in Maryland school districts that have successfully expanded inclusive education for students with disabilities, with the goal of building actionable guidance for school system leaders statewide.
Catherine Worsnop
School of Public Policy
Worsnop’s research analyzes U.S. leadership in the World Health Organization, generating new insights into how presidential decision-making shapes global health governance.
2025 IPL Summer Doctoral Research Fellowship Recipients
Four doctoral students in the School of Public Policy were selected for the Summer Doctoral Research Fellowship, each advancing a distinct dimension of public leadership scholarship.
Isabel Shaheen O’Malley
O’Malley’s work examines wellbeing, labor markets and union participation, advancing journal articles, empirical analyses and conference presentations connected to her dissertation on labor leadership and worker voice.
Meng Feng
Feng’s study investigates the impacts of power outages on mental health in Maryland by combining hospitalization data with detailed outage records, generating findings with implications for emergency management leadership and climate resilience planning.
Piera Celis
Celis’s research explores how leadership actors shape the movement to regulate social media algorithms to protect children and adolescents. Her work includes a manuscript under journal review and newly designed tools for interviewing key stakeholders.
Tania Lamprea
Lamprea analyzes the relationship between social norms and women’s political leadership in Mexico, constructing original datasets and empirical models that illuminate the barriers and opportunities facing women seeking executive office at the municipal level.
Through these awards, IPL continues to expand its role as a hub for research that informs public institutions and strengthens communities. “The collaboration that has emerged from these programs shows our commitment to engaging scholars from diverse academic fields to expand our thinking on public leadership,” said Merritt.
