Undergrad Student Research, Page 1 - Midwest Markets and Entrepreneurship

Since 2016, grants from the Koch Foundation have supported undergraduate students who work on research projects as members of the undergraduate research seminar and/or the Saturday morning research workshops. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences highlighted the Saturday Morning Breakfast Club in their alumni magazine.

OLIVIA BEHN

(’23 supply chain management) received funding to develop a history of start-ups at the ISU Research Park. The project is planned for online publication at the research park website.

Her work was funded by the Koch grant.

BENJAMIN KLEIN

(’21 agricultural business) wrote his senior project on the role of labor productivity on wages, prices and employment, applying time series econometric

methods to quarterly aggregate labor market data from 1947-2019. He is in the first year of the PhD program in economics at Iowa State.

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MAAZIN GLEISNER

(’21 economics, business/managerial econ) completed a study that traced the ‘family tree’ of start-up firms that grew out of the Virtual

Reality Applications Center (VRAC) and Professor James Bernard’s initial venture, Engineering Animation. Maazin found that the original start-up gave birth to six new ventures (children), and they, in turn, led to five grandchildren. VRAC spun off four other start-ups. As a result, VRAC, the initial academic venture, led to 16 separate firms. Maazin is in the MS program at Iowa State.

RASHAD DIXON

(’21 business economics) conducted research on NBA salaries, testing whether recently proposed performance metrics affect salaries for NBA players in the

1980s and 1990s before these performance indicators were developed. He is attending graduate school at the University of Texas.

PEDRO VIEIRA MARASCIULO

(’21 economics and marketing) presented his research on wages paid on internet outsourcing sites such as Freelancer at the National Council on Undergraduate Research

and the Iowa State
honors seminar. He was accepted for graduate school, but then opted to take a research analyst position instead.

NATHALIA KIMMELL

(’21 economics) presented her honors thesis on the effects of the Iowa State University Research Park on venture success and networking. She presented her honors

thesis at the Honors poster session. She received a half-tuition scholarship to attend Duke Law School.

THU TRAN

(’21 economics) received a second Dean’s High Impact Undergraduate Research Award from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to conduct a replication

study of a published paper that claimed higher minimum wages lower the rate of suicide. The paper he wrote last year, “To inform or influence? The difference between data released by nonprofits and by the government,” was published by the Journal of Regional Analysis & Policy. He is attending graduate school at Iowa State.

Undergraduate Student Research