Koylu Receives NSF Award Studying Kinship Networks and Migration

Caglar Koylu, research fellow in the Crime and Justice Research Program, received a $477,734 award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his project titled, "Population-scale kinship networks and migration."

This project creates a population-scale family tree dataset which links about forty million people in crowd-sourced family trees to their common ancestors. The research will use these data to investigate how migration influenced the geographic proximity of kin over centuries, developing an online visual storytelling and education tool to communicate how migrations form cultural and demographic structures. 

By evaluating conditions and theories about how kinship networks change as a result of a variety of economic and demographic circumstances, the project aims to anticipate changes in the present and future through a better understanding of the forces that transform kinship networks and methods for describing them.

Read more about the project on the NSF's website here. If you are a graduate student interested in studying the evolution of kinship networks from crowd-sourced family trees, please reach out to Professor Koylu!