McNeill Common Good Fellows explore issues of justice through summer research

June 27, 2024

McNeill Common Good Fellow Gia Villegas is working with Roots of Health in the Philippines this summer. As part of the organization’s media team, she is collecting content to learn more about the role media plays in reproductive and sexual health care and education.

Annie Brown is seeing America this summer. From Midwestern farm towns to the coastal suburbs of southern California, she’s hitting the road for a research project.

Brown, a McNeill Common Good Fellow at the Institute for Social Concerns, is interviewing teachers, parents, booksellers, and librarians about how recent efforts to ban or censor books have impacted their lives and communities.

“Through on-the-ground reporting and rich conversations, I hope to get a holistic perspective on not just why people ban books, but how community members reconcile with critical ideas of censorship, parental freedom, and politics in the classroom and library,” said Brown, a rising junior majoring in the Program of Liberal Studies with minors in French and Journalism, Ethics & Democracy.

Brown said the McNeill Common Good Fellowship made it possible for her to spend the summer doing this research on an issue of justice.

The three-year, funded fellowship places students in an interdisciplinary community of scholars who are eager to explore how to live an ethical life of meaning, purpose, and impact. With support from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation, the Institute for Social Concerns provides the Common Good fellows with exclusive courses, weekly dinners with faculty, and select immersive experiences as well as an annual stipend.

“Without the fellowship, I would not even remotely be able to engage in the work I’ve been doing this summer,” Brown said. “The idea was sparked for me in the discussions and meetings we had throughout the school year, and the funding made my ambitious ideas to do nearly all my reporting in person possible.”

The group of 15 students in the McNeill Common Good Fellowship come from a wide variety of majors and life experiences. That diversity creates rich discussions during the academic year as they meet to discuss life’s big questions through the lens of the common good. It can also be seen in their summer research, with students working on projects in the sciences and humanities across the United States and internationally.

As a chemistry major, rising junior Charlie Desnoyers said his experience in the McNeill Common Good Fellowship has led him to think more about why and how the work of chemistry is done. And he has begun recognizing questions of justice while doing chemistry research.

This summer, Desnoyers is working in a chemistry lab on Notre Dame’s campus. His main research project is with lipid nanoparticles, which are used in pharmaceuticals such as the Covid-19 vaccines. He’s studying how lipid nanoparticles react to different stimuli they might encounter in the body and thinking about issues such as how the durability of a pharmaceutical affects people’s ability to access it.

“In the fellowship class we talked about how we should approach justice. That has helped guide me in the research process because the first thing about research is finding a question to ask,” Desnoyers said. “The fellowship has been really helpful for understanding how to find a question to ask, how we should approach it, and how we write about and discuss the issue.”

McNeill Common Good Fellow Eamon Nussbaum is working and doing research this summer with an organization in El Salvador that provides early childhood development care and prenatal counseling.

Kylan Hinegardner, a citizen of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, has an eight-week summer internship with Pokagon Health Services in southwest Michigan. A rising junior majoring in neuroscience and behavior, Hinegardner is shadowing different types of medical providers and assisting with data input for the clinic’s weight management and medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) programs.

Hinegardner said the McNeill Common Good Fellowship has underscored the importance of encounters for research and learning.

She was already interested in researching addiction in Native American communities when she became a fellow. But, she said, “I didn’t know exactly how I wanted to go about studying it or what my research question was until I officially began participating in the fellowship. I learned that I can’t know exactly what my research question is until I get time being face to face with the issue I’m trying to address and the people that have been affected by it. My summer internship is how I’m achieving that.”

Eamon Nussbaum, a rising junior majoring in history and pre-health with a minor in Spanish, is in El Salvador this summer. He’s working with the Fundación Salvadoreña para la Salud y Desarrollo Humano, providing early childhood development care and prenatal counseling to underserved populations. In addition, he’s brainstorming a research project on Salvadoran parenting practices and coordinating a field day to promote healthy relationships between kids and their parents.

He said faculty and staff from the Institute for Social Concerns connected him with organizations in Latin America and helped him refine his summer plans and research ideas. But the impact of the fellowship goes far beyond his summer experience.

“Our meetings during the academic year consisted of genuinely challenging debates on the meaning of justice and how to efficiently and authentically pursue it, supplemented by fascinating articles and classic books,” Nussbaum said. “Between our discussions, a winter trip to the Bronzeville neighborhood in Chicago, and excursions in South Bend, I formed incredible friendships and started a quest to find an ethical purpose in my professional and personal life.”

McNeill Common Good Fellow Gia Villegas speaks at a Roots of Health meeting in the Philippines.

Gia Villegas, a rising junior majoring in science business and minoring in collaborative innovation, is spending the summer at Roots of Health, a nonprofit organization with a mission to improve the sexual, maternal, and reproductive health of individuals in Puerto Princesa, Philippines. She’s working with the media team to collect content and learn more about how media can play a role in barriers to or engagement with reproductive and sexual health care and education.

Villegas also said she wouldn’t have been able to do this kind of work without the McNeill Common Good Fellowship and the support of Institute for Social Concerns faculty and staff. But, like other fellows, she said the impact on her life is deeper than this summer experience.

“I have become a more reflective person from this program and more intentional about setting goals for self-improvement while also paying more attention to my surroundings and growing in curiosity,” she said. “This will ultimately help me frame my future and answer my question of how I can incorporate the common good into the life I will live after Notre Dame.”

Learn more about the McNeill Common Good Fellowship.

Related Stories