Learning Beyond the Classroom

This past summer, Ben Mills ’26 conducted field research in San Diego, investigating the impact of the city’s devastating 2024 floods on home prices in both low-income and affluent communities. This fall, David Buckley ‘26 is spending the semester in Lublin, Poland, exploring the ramp-up of Caritas, an international humanitarian aid network, following the surge in demand from Ukrainian refugees.

For most students, having the opportunity to conduct this scale of research is something they wait to do until graduate school or after. Yet through the University of Notre Dame’s Humanitarian Operations (HOPE) Lab and the guidance of faculty director Alfonso Pedraza-Martinez, Mills and Buckley have been able to conduct deep, meaningful research that has the potential to make a real-world impact.

Alfonso Pedraza-Martinez and Ben Mills (BBA ’26)

“Research gives students real problems to wrestle with using the knowledge they have acquired during their time here,” said Pedraza-Martinez, the Greg and Patty Fox Collegiate Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.

“When students are in class, they have lots of structure and they know what they are going to be doing every semester. With research, it is hard to anticipate what happens next,” he added. “You might have this great design for your research, but then your hypothesis does not work. Then you have to reassess, reanalyze and move forward.”

When deciding his research topic, Mills, who is from Phoenix, wanted to analyze an issue that was close to home. He also wanted to focus on housing, noting that his father works in the real estate sector. For him, the historic January 2024 floods in San Diego were a topic that intersected public policy with his academic interests. During what city officials deemed a 1,000-year event, three inches of rain fell in a period of  six to 10 hours, causing floods that spilled over channel banks. The results were devastating, and many homes in the area were destroyed.

Mills, a real estate minor, started his project during his sophomore year and is now entering his third year of research. This past summer, he interviewed 20 people, including residents, real estate professionals and government officials. His goal for the project is to look at the impact that the flood had on low-income homeowners to retain or sell their homes at fair prices and how different that experience was from wealthier individuals.

Before heading out to San Diego, Mills said he expected a unified response. Yet once he began talking to victims of the flood, he found that wasn’t the case. He saw people who had a range of experiences, including someone who lived on the same street as another interviewee, yet had their rent raised right after the flood.

This semester, Mills is analyzing the data he acquired over the summer. Pedraza-Martinez expects Mills’s work to ultimately lead to a published paper in a peer-reviewed journal with the potential to lead to real change in the future.

“My desire is that this has a public policy impact,” said Mills. “I want the government to make sure that this doesn’t happen again.”

While Mills examines natural disasters at home, Buckley has been living the realities of a humanitarian crisis abroad. He spent the summer in Lublin, Poland, researching how Caritas, a Catholic charitable organization, scaled up its operations in response to the massive influx of Ukrainian refugees fleeing war.

Originally, he was volunteering with an NGO in Poland during the summer of 2024. However, after visiting different Caritas branches and seeing how they were adapting, he realized there was an opportunity to study how humanitarian organizations handle sudden surges in demand.

That realization turned into a research proposal, which Buckley successfully funded through the Pulte Institute for Global Development. His case study involves interviews with three groups: volunteers, mid-level staff and directors. In practice, the interviews ranged from 30 minutes to an hour and revealed both inspiring and sobering realities.

One key finding: While global donations initially poured into Lublin, sustaining that level of support proved difficult. Buckley noted that there is now visible fatigue and that future research will examine this transition.

“There was the miracle of public support in the early months,” explained Buckley, a global affairs major, who is also minoring in real estate and innovation and entrepreneurship. “At first, Polish citizens and businesses stepped up massively. At the peak, about 68,000 refugees stayed temporarily in Lublin, 17% of the city population, with over 100,000 accommodated and more than 1.2 million passing through in the first three months.”

By capturing these dynamics, Buckley aims to contribute a case study of how federated NGOs like Caritas adapted structurally during sudden surges in demand, and whether a decentralized model offers comparative advantages in resilience.

“I hope that it can give a template,” said Buckley of his research. “By creating a case study for this branch, I hope it can help for future designs. I think ultimately I hope to add to the dialogue of different NGO structures and how a federated one might have an advantage in cases like these.”

For both students, Pedraza-Martinez’s mentorship has been central to their research. As undergraduates, neither had experience in designing a project of this scale. From how to secure funding to understanding how to put themselves in the shoes of an interviewee, they both praised his guidance. Mills and Buckley also benefited from the HOPE Lab’s support in refining their research design, securing Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval and building a thoughtful interview protocol.

This experience has made a sizable impact on both Mills and Buckley, as each hopes that their work and perseverance will make a difference for years to come.

Ultimately, as Pedraza-Martinez noted, the two have learned lessons that cannot be gained in a classroom.

“In my opinion, real life looks more like the problems that Ben and David are dealing with,” said Pedraza-Martinez. “They have these unstructured social problems and are trying to propose something that will help people’s lives and solve an issue.”