Job Candidates
Hire a University of Houston PhD
Our former PhD students have strong records of accomplishment. Some of our recent graduates have accepted tenure-track faculty positions at University of Wisconsin-Madison, George Washington University, University of Idaho and CIDE in Mexico City. Others have been awarded research positions and instructorships at University of Chicago, USAID at William and Mary and Gallup. We are excited to call your attention to students on the academic job market in Fall 2025. For more information about any of our students, please refer to their websites or contact Tobias Heinrich, the graduate placement coordinator.
Aparajita Datta
Dissertation Title: Towards Energy Justice: How is Policy Feedback Shaping Energy Equity and Climate
Policies in the U.S.?
Dissertation Committee: Ling Zhu (Chair), Tanika Raychaudhuri, Jason Casellas, Ramanan Krishnamoorti, and
Pablo Pinto
Aparajita Datta is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Houston. Her dissertation evaluates the policy feedback effects of means-tested home energy assistance programs. She studies the burdens and disparities in program participation, and the resultant impacts on racial equity, energy justice, and climate policymaking. Aparajita also serves as a researcher at UH Energy, the energy initiative across the University of Houston System. In this role, she focuses on low-carbon technologies and policies, climate resilience, public opinion on energy affordability and carbon management, and workforce development. Her research has been published in Environmental Science & Technology, Frontiers in Climate, Frontiers in Energy Research, and other journals. She has co-authored op-eds in The Hill and The Houston Chronicle and contributes to UH’s Energy Fellows Forbes blogs.
She is currently serving as a Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She is also a member of UH’s inaugural class of Chevron Energy Graduate Fellows. Aparajita holds a bachelor's in computer science and engineering from the University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, India, and master’s degrees in energy management from the C. T. Bauer College of Business and in public policy from the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston.
Tom Hanna
Dissertation Title: Authoritarian Leadership Politics and Autocracy Promotion
Dissertation Committee: Tyson Chatagnier (chair), Scott Basinger, Michael Soules, Patrick Shea (University
of Glasgow)
Tom Hanna is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of political science. He studies international relations and comparative politics. His research interests are authoritarian politics, ideology, conflict, and political economy. His dissertation examines the role of leadership ideology and rhetoric in nondemocracies in fostering threats by those states to democracies. He was awarded an Oskar Morgenstern Fellowship in quantitative Political Economy for 2022-2023 and an Adam Smith Fellowship for 2023-2024 by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. His teaching experience includes Introduction to Comparative Politics, Research Design, Statistical Methods, and American Government.
H.M. Kim
Dissertation Title: Particularism under Candidate-Centered Election
Dissertation Committee: Susan Scarrow (Chair), Edurado Alemán, Tanya Bagashka, Ko Maeda (University of North Texas)
H.M. Kim is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Houston. His research investigates how candidate-centric electoral systems shape electoral behavior and political accountability, with a particular focus on campaign strategies. His dissertation, “Particularism under Candidate-Centered Elections”, theorizes and empirically tests how intra-party competition under single non-transferable voting influences candidates’ particularistic policy appeals and examines its implications for legislative corruption.
His broader research interests include electoral systems, political corruption, and local governance. Methodologically, he employs a mixed-methods approach that combines elite interviews, text-as-data techniques, and machine learning. His work contributes to debates in comparative politics by linking electoral institutions to campaign strategies and accountability outcomes at the subnational level.
Shiladitya Kumar
Dissertation Title: Three Essays on the Political Economy of Indian Elections
Dissertation Committee: Susan Scarrow (Chair), Jessica Gottlieb (Co-Chair), Jae-Hee Jung (Rice University), Adam Ziegfeld (Temple University)
Shiladitya Kumar is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Houston. His research interests lie in Party Organization, Political Economy of Elections, Political Methodology, and South Asian Politics. He holds a BSc (Honors) and MA in Economics from the University of Calcutta and Jadavpur University, respectively. He works as a Graduate Research Assistant at both the Hobby School of Public Affairs and the Department of Political Science, University of Houston.
His dissertation concerns how candidates' wealth interacts within an electoral system to produce political outcomes with meaningful second-order implications. His other research projects include studying the cause of affective polarization in the United States, how voters use reputation as an instrument of accountability in selecting candidates under repeated elections, and investigating political speeches and manifestos in Indian General Elections using supervised machine-learning techniques.
He is a recipient of the Jylee Nogee Scholarship at the University of Houston and the Virginia Gray Graduate Student Research Award from the Political Organization and Parties section of the American Political Science Organization. His undergraduate teaching experience covers American and Texas Institutions, Comparative Politics, and Statistics/Inference with Data.
Lucia Lopez
Dissertation Title: How Features of Policy Design and Misperceptions Shape Attitudes Toward Social Policy
Dissertation Committee: Scott Clifford (Co-chair), Ling Zhu (Co-Chair), Allison Archer, Beth Simas, Emily
Thorson
Lucia Lopez is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Houston
and a licensed attorney. Her research lies at the intersection of public opinion,
public policy, and law, drawing on insights from political psychology to understand
how policy design and misperceptions influence what people think about government
programs and about the people who benefit from them. Her dissertation — funded by
the Rapoport Family Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation — explores how specific
features of policy design shape public perceptions of the people who receive benefits
and affect support for programs like welfare and housing vouchers. She also studies
what the public knows or thinks they know about policy using state-level surveys.
Using survey experiments, she tests the conditions under which correcting these misperceptions
about policy design can increase support for social policy and improve perceptions
of policy beneficiaries.
Beyond the dissertation, Lucia’s broader research agenda extends to public law, where
she investigates how institutional design shapes public opinion about legal systems,
courts, and access to justice. She is especially interested in how the public evaluates
legal claimants, judicial institutions, and procedural fairness through the lens of
effort, reciprocity, and deservingness. She also examines the downstream consequences
of policy attitudes — particularly how policy disagreement shapes democratic engagement
and support for anti-democratic actions such as political violence.
Lucia's work is forthcoming at Public Opinion Quarterly and has been published in the Cleveland State Law Review. Lucia was recently selected as a 2025-26 Early Career Fellow with both APSA's Experimental
Research section and APSA's Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior (EPOVB)
section.