Saumyaa Gupta (POLS & PSYC ’24), an international student from India, attended the 2023 MIT Summer Research Program.

The program promotes the value of graduate education and offers talented undergraduates the opportunity to conduct research and gain methodological training.

Saumyaa worked with mentors in MIT’s political science department on projects investigating grassroots mobilization and democratic authoritarianism in the Middle East.

This project was a great fit for Saumyaa, who had recently returned from a semester in Jordan and Turkey where she studied the geopolitics of the Middle East and the dynamics of the Syrian refugee crisis in those two states.

Saumyaa plans to continue working on the MIT research this fall and fold it into her senior honors thesis.