Welcoming an incredible team for spring 2025
An incredible group of faculty fellows, senior fellows, graduate assistants, and community partners will power CDCE's work in the spring semester.
At the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement (CDCE), we believe that doing impactful research starts with building the right team. We do our best work when we co-create research with community partners, engage faculty with relevant specialized expertise, and give research assistants opportunities to develop and use their skills. That’s why we are so excited about the incredible CDCE affiliates who we are working with this spring!
Faculty Fellows
At CDCE, we invite UMD faculty members to join us as faculty fellows. These fellows help advance CDCE research and are able to use CDCE personnel and assets for their own projects.
We are so thrilled to welcome Alex Flores and Richard Engstrom to CDCE this spring as faculty fellows! Alex’s research focuses on U.S. voters who use languages other than English. At CDCE, he is currently working on a project to explore how election officials can make strategic decisions about how to sequence and structure the release of election results and voter files to cultivate public trust and confidence. Rich specializes in the use of administrative datasets to study state and local politics. At CDCE, he will help lead our efforts to leverage administrative datasets across all projects.
Alex and Rich join Antoine Banks, Chryl Laird, and Janelle Wong as CDCE Faculty Fellows. Since joining CDCE in 2021, Antoine, Chryl, and Janelle have made countless contributions to our research. We are so excited to see what we can accomplish with this expanded group of faculty fellows.
The CDCE community also includes many incredible PhD alumni of the UMD Government and Politics Department who have moved on to other universities! These scholars made important contributions to ongoing CDCE research while at UMD and they can continue to make those contributions by serving as CDCE faculty fellows after they move on from UMD. We are so grateful to have Alauna Safarpour, Jared McDonald, and Amy Meli continuing their work with us this spring.
Senior Fellows
At CDCE, we believe in co-creating our research projects with the community partners we serve. By appointing these partners as Senior Fellows, we can formally recognize their contributions to research and more effectively collaborate to fill knowledge gaps.
We are so thrilled to welcome Karenthia Barber, Kassie Phebillo, and David Levine to CDCE as new Senior Fellows this spring.
Karenthia has had a storied career in civic life and party politics in Maryland. She will be supporting CDCE’s efforts to engage with members of local election boards across the state and study the impact of Baltimore City’s shift to hold municipal elections at the same time as presidential elections.
Kassie serves as Student Engagement Director at the Campus Vote Project and will work with CDCE to steward and analyze data from their annual student engagement survey.
David is an expert in election integrity and has served as an election official in Richmond (VA), Washington (DC), and Ada County (ID). David has already made important contributions to CDCE’s work with the U.S Election Assistance Commission to classify election jobs and will support all of CDCE’s work co-creating knowledge with elections professionals.
Karenthia, Kassie, and David are joining a dynamic group of Senior Fellows who are making important contributions at CDCE every day. This spring, Alysoun McLaughlin and Lynn Handy will continue the work they started at CDCE in 2024 to study the elections workforce. Emily White and Jahnavi Rao will continue their efforts with CDCE to understand how to mobilize leaders in pop culture and education to help welcome all new voters. And Cleo Hirsch and Isaac Frumkin will continue to advise the Effective Government Transitions Project as we prepare for transitions following the midterm elections in 2026.
Graduate Assistants
Every year, graduate students in the UMD Government and Politics department make important original contributions to research projects at CDCE. This spring we are thrilled to welcome Kennedy Lighty and Jordan Sepncer as graduate assistants. They join Jillian Rothschild, Sonia Vargas, Isaiah Espinoza, and Isabelle Jensen who will all be returning to CDCE after making important contributions in 2024 to research projects related to the Washington Post-UMD poll, voter ID laws, high school voter mobilization, Vote 16 implementation, and the impact of recruiting veterans to serve as poll workers.
Get involved with CDCE this spring!
It is such a joy to work with this team! They bring such a wide range of expertise and experience to our research and enable us to have an impact strengthening democracy every day. If you want to get involved with CDCE or learn more about our work, please reach out. We are always on the lookout for new researchers and community partners to work with.
Mike Hanmer is co-Principal Investigator of the Maryland Democracy Initiative, Director of the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement and the Michael Miller Endowed Faculty Fellow in Government and Politics. Sam Novey is Chief Strategist at the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement.