2023 – Forced Migration

Although people have migrated since the beginning of recorded history, population movements today are unprecedented in their scope and complexity. The 2023 REU students were exposed to an interdisciplinary forced migration project that uses a unique combination of administrative, organic, and survey data to model internal and international forced displacement. The project integrated both state of the art and beyond state-of-the-art computational methods for data collection, variable construction, model construction, and analysis. 

11 students from across the country worked in three groups, each focusing on a specific country facing a migration crisis and each with a different national language: Ukraine (Ukrainian), Venezuela (Spanish), and Sudan (Arabic). Students worked together in groups, received lectures from interdisciplinary faculty, went on field trips around the DC area, and finally presented their work in a meeting with UNHCR researchers and at a poster presentation on Georgetown’s campus. A subset of these students continued their work into the fall semester to co-author a paper about their findings.

Cohort