Economics Ph.D. student Chon-Kit Ao was selected in May 2016 as a winner of the 2015 IPUMS-USA Research Award in the Graduate Student Category for his paper "The Effect of Municipal Water Filtration on Children's School Enrollment and Employment in American Cities, 1880-1920".  This is an annual award made by the Minnesota Population Center (MPC) at the University of Minnesota, and honors the best graduate student paper that uses U.S. census microdata.  The MPC wrote: "This year we had a record number of submissions for the IPUMS-USA research award and many were of excellent quality. In the end, the selection committee chose two winners in each category. The winning submissions study novel topics, use many years of either integrated census data or full count historical census data, and will likely all have an impact in their respective fields."  (See https://pop.umn.edu/data-user-resources/award for more information about the award.)

Chon-Kit Ao has accepted a position as an assistant professor of economics at National Cheng Kung University, Tainan City, Taiwan starting in the Fall semester 2016.