Congratulations to Johns Hopkins SAIS Faculty Award Winners

Matthias Matthijs, assistant professor of International Political Economy at Johns Hopkins SAIS, is a 2015–2016 recipient of the prestigious and highly competitive Johns Hopkins Catalyst Award, intended to support promising research of early-career faculty across all JHU divisions. Matthijs received the maximum award of $75,000 for his research project, “Varieties of Austerity and its Political Discontents,” with a focus on the United States, France, and the United Kingdom since the early 1990s. The project, which will investigate the causes of the persistent weakening of democratic legitimacy in advanced industrial states, will result in a monograph that will serve as the basis for his second sole-authored book, which he aims to finish by late 2016. In addition to contributing to academic scholarship on political legitimacy and economic policymaking in advanced Western democracies, one of the intended innovations of this project is to apply an interdisciplinary approach combining comparative politics and international political economy.

This current academic year, Matthijs will dedicate most of his time to his catalyst research project. He will also be co-teaching the year-long Transatlantic Research Seminar with Erik Jones, which focuses on “dysfunctional democracy” and will result in a special issue for Government and Opposition (a top Cambridge University Press journal in comparative politics). During the spring 2016 semester, he will be conducting field research and interviews in Europe and serve as a visiting fellow at Sciences Po in Paris as well as at the European Institute of the London School of Economics. He will be resident in Bologna during his junior sabbatical in the fall of 2016 and will be teaching at SAIS Europe during the spring of 2017 before returning to Johns Hopkins SAIS Washington in the summer of 2017.



Jonathan Haskett, associate director of the Energy, Resources and Environment (ERE) Program at Johns Hopkins SAIS, is a 2015–2016 Johns Hopkins Discovery Award recipient, together with a group of colleagues from the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Whiting School of Engineering and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. The Discovery Award program provides support to cross-divisional teams with the aim of encouraging synergistic work across academic disciplines in order to answer important questions that touch on more than one area of expertise. Haskett’s team received over $130,000 in program planning funds for a project titled, “Modeling the Effects of Climate Change on the Global Food System” to be conducted in AY2015–2016. The project focuses on the impact of climate change on the world food system.

The world food system is vulnerable to disruption by climate change in virtually every aspect, including production, processing, distribution, consumption and disposal. This creates increased risks of food insecurity and accompanying hunger, famine, malnutrition and political instability. Although there is an extensive body of scientific work modeling climate impacts on the food supply, there is relatively little work on climate impacts on many important food production sectors as well as effects on the broader food system and related political, social and economic factors affecting access to food. The project brings together a multidisciplinary team that will use a dynamic systems modeling approach to link climate, food system and economic models with the aim of conducting an initial examination of these potential impacts, with a view to create new information on these less studied impacts as well as identifying knowledge gaps and creating a research agenda for future work.