By Lucas Hubbard

August 7, 2020

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a grant to the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University for a new project studying the political effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The year-long study, “RAPID: Understanding the Disparate Impact of COVID-19,” will research the effects of the pandemic “on health, economic, and political outcomes that would be difficult to collect retrospectively,” according to a summary of the project’s research plan. Crucially, it will study the effect of the policy response in the wake of the initial spread, noting how that response will “shape behavior in the lead up to presidential elections in November 2020.”

The grant’s personnel include William A. Darity Jr., the Cook Center’s director and the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics at Duke University, who will serve the project’s principal investigator; Pablo Beramandi, Professor of Political Science at Duke University, is its co-principal investigator. Omer Ali, a postdoctoral associate at the Cook Center, will also play a key role in the year-long analysis.