“You might think economics and English are on completely different ends of the spectrum,” said URECA scholar Giselle Maronilla ’20. “But in both studies, you’re looking at relationships, between words, between variables, between settings and characters, factors and outcomes. Everything is all about relationships and trying to analyze those.”
Born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and a graduate of Scarsdale High School in New York, Maronilla began her Stony Brook career as an English scholar but soon embraced research in the field of economics under the direction of Associate Professor Meta Brown.
Her summer research project examined the decline of the American Dream, looking at variables including parent/child household income, population density, employment rates, racial and gender shares, educational attainment breakdown, job density, etc.
“My research is econometric work – and the metrics part of econometrics means that I deal a lot with numbers and formulas and statistical theory,” Maronilla said.
“The econ part of it means that there’s a story behind the numbers,” she said. “And for me that’s important and that’s exciting, and the story is local. It’s interesting because it hits home.”
Maronilla has been active on campus as a University Scholars Fellow, as well as a contributor to The Stony Brook Press. In addition, she has written and published articles on culture and technology as a summer intern at Spine Media in Manhattan. Giselle hopes to work on problems that involve data, society, and law in her future professional career.
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