The Cline Center is pleased to announce the 2025-2026 David F. Linowes Faculty Fellows: Assistant Professor Don Casler of the Department of Political Science and Associate Professor Yun Huang of the School of Information Sciences.
Linowes Fellowships support scholars whose work is relevant to Cline Center initiatives and who plan to use Cline Center data and technology in innovative projects.
Professor Casler’s project aims to understand why some political leaders respond to traumatic events by becoming more aggressive, while others become more cautious, in the domain of foreign policy. Though leaders generally want to stay in power, different leaders often respond quite differently to otherwise similar circumstances, even when their very lives are at stake. To address this puzzle, the study links data from the Cline Center’s Coup d’etat Project with information about leaders’ hawkishness and behavior in international disputes. It also uses the Cline Center’s Global News Index and Archer toolkit to analyze trends in media coverage before and after instances of political violence. Understanding why some, but not all leaders become more hawkish in these cases holds important implications for international security.
Professor Huang's project aims to advance public understanding and critical analysis of the SPOTLITE dataset through AI-supported, persona-driven interactions. Specifically, by designing AI personas—ranging from scholarly and policy-oriented to civic and community-based—the proposed solutions will empower user, e.g., students, researchers, and stakeholders, to engage more deeply with complex data, reducing the risk of misinterpretation or bias. The research will generate design insights for the responsible use of AI in sensitive contexts, contribute to HCI scholarship, workforce training in data literacy and decision-making, and more meaningful public engagement across multi-stakeholder groups.
You can learn more about their projects and the Linowes Fellowship here: https://clinecenter.illinois.edu/get-involved/LinowesFellows