For my senior project, I joined a research group led by Professor Theresa Migler discussing political and economic networks. The first quarter, we read research papers about various techniques used for these kinds of networks. The second quarter, we split up into teams and came up with our own research question we wanted to address. I proposed the idea of a migration network, initially with the goal to study the effect of climate change on migration. However, finding global weather data proved to be too great of a challenge, and we instead pivoted towards politics.

We ended up constructing a migration network representation in Python, and then overlaid information about a country's democratic index (as determined by The Economist) to give us some intuition about how politics affected the decision to migrate to different countries. We finished our senior project in June of 2024, and Professor Migler asked if anyone wanted to continue working on the project with the goal of submitting to Complex Networks 2024. I was already planning on being in SLO in the summer for SURP, so I was happy to keep working on it.

Over the summer, I found a key limitation in our dataset, with us having been using migrant stock data (the total number of people who originated from a specific country who currently live in a destination country) instead of migration flow data (the number of people moving from country A to country B in a given year). I thankfully found Abel and Cohen's migration flow estimates dataset and was able to update our codebase to use that.

After fixing the issue, I started working on the conference paper, and finished it up in September. It was accepted to Complex Networks 2024 in October, and then presented at the conference in Turkey by Professor Migler in December.

You can access the paper here: link