Mendoza Team awarded Poverty Research grant

(Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame)

The Notre Dame Poverty Initiative has announced a new round of multi-year investments that will support high-impact, poverty-related research projects led by Notre Dame faculty in multiple disciplines.

The Initiative’s second annual call for proposals drew a strong response, with 18 submissions from faculty representing 13 different departments, centers, and institutes across campus. From this highly competitive applicant pool, four projects were selected for 2025 Poverty Research Package funding.

These four projects will join three awarded in 2024, totalling seven teams representing five colleges across Notre Dame — the College of Arts & Letters, the College of Engineering, the Keough School of Global Affairs, the Mendoza College of Business, and the College of Science.

Frank Germann

“The challenges that poverty presents are many and varied,” said Jim Sullivan, director of the Notre Dame Poverty Initiative and professor of economics. “It takes diverse approaches and a robust range of research methodologies to tackle it. The Poverty Initiative is proud to support some of the University’s brightest minds in their examinations of what causes poverty and how to end it.”

Mendoza  College of Business Team Project

Frank Germann, a professor of marketing and chair of the Department of Marketing, is leading a randomized, controlled trial that explores the potential of large language models to provide scalable, AI-driven mentorship for entrepreneurs in emerging markets. Germann’s research focuses on Kampala, Uganda, and will be supported by co-principal investigator Fr. Arthur Ssembajja, a Research Visitor at Notre Dame and a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the University of Tübingen (Germany).

Read about the other teams and projects at ND News.