Dr. Manal Shehabi ’03

Experience as an Ursinus Summer Fellow

Dr. Manal Shehabi is a former Summer Fellow, whose work in the program continues to inform her career as an applied economist. Today, she focuses on interdisciplinary research and policy advisory work on energy, economics, and sustainability. As an Ursinus sophomore, she not only realized that she enjoyed research, but also that she excelled at it.

Her project, “Combatting the Stereotype: Islam’s Compatibility with Democracy,” which was awarded the Eugene H. Miller Prize for Best Essay in a Subject in Political Science, led to honors research working with Associate Professor Politics Rebecca Evans and Professor of Business and Economics Andrew Economopoulos. It was then that she learned the value of interdisciplinary work.

“My honors research considered both economic and political development and both quantitative and qualitative methods,” said Shehabi. “The Summer Fellows experience and the honors project that followed made me want to continue doing research, but to also focus on applied work that can actually improve things in the real world.”

After graduation, she worked in business public policy and then in economic consulting. In both jobs she used skills obtained during her Summer Fellows research, but she also credits the experience for inspiring her to obtain a doctorate degree in economics.

“Like my Summer Fellows research project, in my Ph.D. I embarked on a research question despite objections from many, but continuing despite the noise enabled me to make important contributions to energy and economic sustainability challenges,” said Shehabi. “To demonstrate, when I started my Ph.D. research, some prominent experts said examining sustainability in oil-dependent economies in the Middle East was not an important question because these states had lots of money, but when the oil price collapsed in 2014, my research came to the forefront. So persistence and support of my research mentors paid off.”

Now located in Oxford, U.K., Shehabi is a faculty member at the University of Oxford, and founding director of SHEER Research & Advisory Ltd.

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Summer Fellows: A 30-Year Showcase of Exploration and Dedication

The Summer Fellows program as we know it today has roots dating back 30 years, when a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) grant supported the work of 10 student-faculty research pairs in the sciences in the summer of 1992. Four years later, the college expanded the program to include students from every discipline, and then it was cemented as a permanent offering in 1999.