Ying Shi, assistant professor of public administration and international affairs, has been named a William T. Grant Scholar and received a $350,000 award to explore Asian American students’ exposure to victimization and hate crimes in school.

Shi will use the funding over the next five years to pursue a research project titled “School Victimization and Hate Crime Exposure Among Asian Students: An Evidence Base to Reduce Well-Being Inequality.” The project includes two studies that will use administrative data from multiple U.S. cities and states to gather evidence on the prevalence and consequences of exposure to school victimization and hate crimes for Asian students compared with their peers.

This topic is overlooked, Shi says, as research on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders tends to focus on their relative academic success, which can contribute to the “model minority” stereotype and perpetuate harm by homogenizing the group’s experiences. Findings from the project can help inform district- and school-based policies that may alleviate racial inequality in well-being, tailored for Asian students and other marginalized groups, she says.

Funding is provided through the William T. Grant Scholars Program, which funds early-career researchers on topics that relate to racial, ethnic or economic inequality among young people ages 5-25 in the United States. Each year, between four and six scholars are selected. Shi is the first scholar to be awarded from Syracuse University.

The award supports mentorship from experts in areas pertinent to scholars’ development. Shi will receive mentorship on the study of Asian Americans by Jennifer Lee at Columbia University and on the social determinants of health and machine learning by her Maxwell School colleague, Michiko Ueda-Ballmer, associate professor of public administration and international affairs.

Shi says Lee and Ueda-Ballmer have been “so supportive and such cheerleaders for this type of work.” She adds, “Having them say ‘this is important’ gives me a lot of energy and validation.”

Past research by Shi on education and racial disparities has been supported by the William T. Grant Foundation as well as other organizations. For instance, she was principal investigator on a William T. Grant Foundation-funded project from 2021-23 titled “Long-Term Consequences of the Voting Rights Act for Black-White Disparities in Children’s Later-Life Outcomes.”

Shi is a senior research associate in the Center for Policy Research. Her areas of expertise are racial inequality and education policy. She received a Ph.D. from Duke University in 2017.

By Michael Kelley