2026–2027 Fellowship Application

Economic instability and neighborhood disinvestment are closely linked to disproportionate rates of violence and premature death. This Fellowship is a deep immersion into the poverty–violence relationship, with the aim of developing a credible roadmap to reduce violence through practical, measurable action. Fellows will analyze who is most affected, where violence concentrates, what conditions correlate with risk, and what has and has not worked in past efforts. Fellows will create a database of all murders, shootings, violent assaults, and knifings across the U.S. and keep a running, up-to-date count that will be part of the Bergel Institute website.

This Fellowship gives you the opportunity to identify one place in the United States and focus on ensuring it has the resources required for residents to gain economic stability and independence. Fellows will use The Bergel Institute's Poverty Action Guide as a foundation to identify the barriers keeping families in poverty and to design an implementation-ready plan. The work will focus on the conditions that most directly shape long-term stability, including employment, education, basic needs, transportation, child care, health, housing, savings, and safety. By the end of the Fellowship, the Fellow will produce a pilot model and roadmap that can be adapted and replicated in other communities.

This Fellowship will explore where AI can remove long-standing obstacles to stability, including translation issues on forms, limited English proficiency when searching and applying for jobs online, navigating cost-of-living differences across regions, and making informed relocation decisions. The Fellowship will also examine applications that expand opportunity by reducing shocks and removing barriers to stability — from satellite imagery mapping poverty to AI tools for disaster relief, small-farm optimization, and remote education platforms. By the end of the Fellowship, the Fellow will produce a credible roadmap for what can be built, who must be involved, what barriers to adoption exist, and what can be implemented in the near term.

Science can reshape how we live and what we believe is possible. It can also be misunderstood, oversold, or used to justify claims that go far beyond the evidence. This Fellowship asks: how do we rigorously interpret the past 100+ years of scientific work, and what, if anything, does it suggest about human potential and what is possible in our lives? Fellows will examine frameworks from quantum mechanics and chaos theory to string theory and consciousness research — applying rigorous critical thinking to separate genuine scientific insight from overreach.