Evangelista Graduate Fellows 2026-27

Our Evangelista Fellows are master's, doctoral, and law students at Cornell who receive unique opportunities for professional networking and development in the field of peace and conflict studies. Meet the 2026–27 cohort.

Boyang Liu (Spring)

Boyang Liu is a PhD student in the Department of Government. His major field of study is Comparative Politics, with minor fields in American Politics and Methods. His research examines the sources of legitimacy and political support in non-democratic regimes, with a regional focus on Russia, Central Asia, and the broader post-Soviet region. His current research explores how the Russo-Ukrainian war has affected Russian citizens’ willingness to participate in political activities, including protests.

Carmine Couloute 

Carmine Couloute is a PhD student in the Department of Government, specializing in International Relations. Her research focuses on ethnographically examining the enduring impact of French colonialism in Francophone West Africa. She aims to explore how protests over 'war taxes' facilitate practices of sovereignty and self-determination during political upheaval.

Cassidy Fowler 

Cassidy Fowler is a PhD student at Cornell University’s Department of Government. Her research focuses on international security, with a particular interest in nuclear weapons strategy and operations, IR theory, and security studies.

Filip Galic (Spring)

Filip Galic is a PhD candidate in architectural history whose research examines how architectural ideology shifted as transformations in the transnational political economy and conflicts reshaped the conditions of architectural practice between Europe and post-Ottoman Non-Aligned geographies during the long Cold War. His work follows architect-planner-pedagogues moving across uneven postcolonial relations to ask how architectural knowledge was produced, translated, and mobilized for reciprocal ideological projects under asymmetrical conditions.

Mahasti Yuanita  

Mahasti Yuanita is an MPA student at Cornell University’s Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy. Her research interests focus on economic governance, emerging technologies, inequality, and conflict vulnerability in domestic, transnational, and global policy issues. Before coming to Cornell, she worked on macroeconomic and fiscal policy in Indonesia, with experience in policy analysis, cross-ministerial coordination, and international economic cooperation. Her work explores how economic shocks, technological change, and financial governance shape state capacity, social cohesion, and equitable policy responses.

Nikky Suárez

Nikky Suárez is an incoming fourth-year Colombian American doctoral student in Cornell's Comparative Literature program raised in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Her multicultural positioning within her doctoral research examines Afro-Indigenous cumbia as an embodied archive, tracing how the movement of the dancers mirrors the flows of human migration within how colonialism restructures land and memory across continents into Colombia through the historical significance of the Magdalena River. She has presented her research at international conferences and academic panels across the United States, Egypt, the United Kingdom, and France, contributing to global conversations on migration, diaspora, and the politics of cultural expression.

Or Aroch

Or Aroch is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology. His research explores how young children become political subjects in the context of Israel/Palestine. Focusing on elementary schools in Israel, he examines how educators seek to create a sense of normalcy during times of war and civic upheaval. The project traces how these efforts are negotiated across state curricula, school activities, classroom interactions, and children's everyday lives, inquiring into their normalizing effects on children's political subjectivities.

Shruthi Ramani

Yousef Alay

Yousef is a public policy professional and legal practitioner with expertise in regulatory frameworks, emerging technology, and economic policy. He co-founded Haseef, a regulatory technology platform helping SMEs navigate compliance more effectively, and served as a public policy advisor at one of the region's most ambitious development initiatives, where he led the benchmarking of regulatory regimes across 20+ sectors and contributed to drafting the founding legislative documents.

He also led the negotiation of PPP contracts on behalf of Riyadh City to mobilise private sector investment into the city's municipal assets, experience connecting regulatory practice to real-world economic development.

At the Reppy Institute, Yousef's research interests sit at the intersection of regulatory frameworks, emerging technology governance, and international economic policy, with a focus on how policy and institutional design drive sustainable economic development in high-growth regions.

He holds a law degree with first-class honours from King Abdulaziz University and is pursuing a Master of Public Administration (Economic Policy) at Cornell University. A World Economic Forum Global Shaper, he has represented youth voices in international governance through the Saudi National Youth Council for the UN Global Compact and served as President of the Saudi Student Association at Cornell.

Ziyi Wang

Ziyi Wang is an Economics PhD and JD candidate at Cornell University. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C. Her research interests include Economic Development, Industrial Organization, Innovation, Platform Economics, and Empirical Legal Studies. She is a Research Associate at the UN75 Global Governance Forum. She is from Beijing, China.