Luke Bellinger, University of Texas at Austin
Luke Bellinger is a government and humanities honors major at the University of Texas at Austin and a continuing student at Tarrant County College. He is a Sumners Scholar and earned the Harry Hale Award for undergraduate research from the Association for the Scientific Study of Religion. His main research interest is religion and politics, with a focus on political socialization in minority religious communities. He is also broadly interested in public opinion on religiously charged social issues, such as public opinion on gay marriage and abortion. He is also working on several projects related to gerrymandering. He is interested in both qualitative and quantitative methods and is especially interested in ethnographies. He also works as a research assistant on several projects, including creating crime trends reports for Texas, interviewing people of color about health behavior, and building an AI to anonymize qualitative data. He will be applying to PhD programs in political science in December 2025. He hopes to become a professor someday in order to continue his research and teach people about the American government.