Spring 2026 midd.data Micro Grant Recipients

Erick Gong
Professor of Economics 
Department of Economics

Professor Erick Gong received a micro grant to develop practical uses of agentic AI to expand how data and computational methods are incorporated into both teaching and research. The core goal is to build and evaluate a set of persistent AI agents that can assist with data assembly, cleaning, documentation, and the generation of reproducible coding tasks.

Caitlin Myers
John G. McCullough Professor of Economics 
Department of Economics

Professor Myers received a micro grant to work with colleagues David Munro and Jim Flynn at Miami University to study the effects of post-Dobbs abortion bans on risky sexual behaviors, testing the hypothesis that people are responding to bans by seeking to reduce the probability of unintended pregnancy. One primary analysis relies on Nielsen retail scanner data to measure store-level condom purchases, allowing them to study whether people are buying more condoms in response to the bans. 

Olga Parshina
Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology 
Department of Psychology

Professor Parshina received a micro grant to demonstrate how large-scale, openly available digital corpora - in this case, a cross-linguistic eye-tracking dataset - can be leveraged to answer questions that were previously out of reach for researchers without access to expensive lab infrastructure.