We are pleased to announce that two Ph.D. candidates from the Department of Government, Julio Solis Arce and Chengyu Fu, have been awarded competitive traveling research fellowships for the 2025–26 academic year.
Administered by the Committee on General Scholarships at the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS), these fellowships support outstanding graduate students pursuing research or study abroad.
Julio Solis Arce has been selected for the Sheldon Traveling Fellowship. A Ph.D. candidate whose research focuses on the political economy and cultural foundations of institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa, Julio explores how collective choice and non-state institutional structures influence development. His interdisciplinary work bridges political science, economics, and anthropology, utilizing methods such as experimental economics and ethnography.
He is an active member of several Harvard centers, including the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS), and the Center for International Development. His global academic journey—from Mexico to Benin to Berlin—has uniquely positioned him to undertake innovative field research abroad.
Chengyu Fu has also been awarded the Sheldon Traveling Fellowship to support his comparative political economy research. Chengyu’s work examines corruption, governance, and inequality, with a primary focus on authoritarian regimes and developing countries, particularly China. Through fieldwork and theoretical analysis, his work seeks to better understand political accountability and institutional reform under non-democratic rule.
Chengyu’s research has received support from a range of prominent institutions, including the American Political Science Association (APSA), the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Harvard Asia Center, the Harvard Kennedy School, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS), and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. At Harvard, he is a Desmond and Whitney Shum Fellow at the Fairbank Center and a Graduate Student Affiliate at the Weatherhead Center.
Congratulations to Julio and Chengyu on this achievement, and we look forward to the insights their work will bring to the academic community and beyond.