The Graduate School at the University of Utah annually awards Marriner S. Eccles Graduate Fellowships to enable graduate students to pursue advanced research projects in fields relating to relationships among politics, public policy and the economy. The fellowship was first awarded in fall 1977, making this fall’s cohort the 45th year of the award.
Established by an endowment from Marriner S. Eccles, the first chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the Marriner S. Eccles Fellowship is for full-time graduate students pursuing research in banking, business, education, finance, humanities, law, and social sciences.
Thanks to the generosity of the Marriner S. Eccles Foundation, this prestigious fellowship continues to support graduate students year after year.
Learn more about the Marriner S. Eccles Graduate Fellowship here.
Yuchen Zhang is a rising fourth-year Ph.D. student specializing in finance. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in logistics management from Lingnan College at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China. After finishing his undergraduate degree, Yuchen moved to Vancouver and studied at the University of British Columbia, where he received his Master of Science in finance. Given his one-year study in the school of public health and exposure to finance research in business school, Yuchen has developed a strong interest in corporate governance and health finance. He is grateful to receive this fellowship and wants to contribute to the literature on corporate governance in non-profit hospital settings and provide policy implications for non-profit hospitals through his research. He believes this fellowship will prove extremely useful in helping him achieve these objectives.
Janae Chandler, MPP is a doctoral student in Family Consumer Studies. Her research focuses on the cognitive and behavioral bases of household financial decisions. Janae is a long-time personal finance educator. Over the past ten years, she has taught personal finance at Salt Lake Community College, Brigham Young University, and the University of Utah. Janae is committed to helping individuals and families improve their financial well-being. With her research, she desires to connect theoretical models of consumption and saving with actual household financial decisions. She is honored to receive the Marriner S. Eccles Graduate Fellowship. This award will allow her to focus full-time on her dissertation that aims to link intertemporal allocation and wealth accumulation to a perceptual bias of exponential growth. Janae looks forward to interdisciplinary collaboration with other researchers interested in the intersection of politics, public policy, and the economy.
Da Huang is a Ph.D. candidate in finance at the David Eccles School of Business. His research interests focus on empirical asset pricing and market microstructure to examine the impact of passive index investing on mutual fund industry and financial market efficiency. He is the recipient of the Monty & Christine Botosan Bridge to Practice Doctoral Award in recognition of his research excellence. Upon receiving the Marriner S. Eccles Fellowship, he is excited to continue to produce high quality research to contribute to the conversion in political economy centered around regulation of financial market and investment industry.