The APSA Best Poster Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best poster presented by a graduate student or early career scholar at the previous APSA Annual Meeting.
Citation from the Award Committee:
The committee was impressed with Annamaria Prati’s poster design as well as with the project it presents. Prati concisely discusses a range of views in the extant literature then puts forward a novel theory that has important implications for both political science and policy. The data collection is impressive and Prati carefully works through threats to causal inference, conducting a series of convincing robustness checks. As a group, we were convinced that UNDP state-building projects can indeed help mitigate violence and urge both political scientists and policy-makers to take note.
Annamaria Prati is a PhD candidate in political science at Washington University in St. Louis. Annamaria broadly studies how the international community supports fragile states using mixed methods and novel datasets. Her dissertation examines the effects of peacebuilding projects led by the United Nations Development Programme on local governance around the world, including studies featuring field work in Nepal, computational social science and machine learning methods, and formal theory. Before attending Washington University in St. Louis, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with honors from Stanford University, earning a Bachelor’s degree in international relations. She also holds Master’s degrees from the University of Chicago and Columbia University. Her work has been supported by the Washington University’s Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Equity, the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy, and the Institute for Humane Studies. Annamaria is currently on the academic job market.
APSA thanks the committee members for their service: Dr. Avital Livny (Chair) of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Stephanie Chan of Lafayette College, Dr. Simon Haeder of Texas A&M University, Dr. Daniel Mallinson of Penn State University, Harrisburg, and Dr. Nicole Yadon of Ohio State University.