It’s Mother’s Day this week in the US and other parts of the globe, and Ritsa Giannakas is wearing a necklace that honors her matrilineage on both sides. In gold Arabic script, it bears the name she took from her Greek grandmother, Ritsa ريتسا, in the language of her maternal grandmother, Kowkab, in Lebanon. 

Ritsa’s forebears imparted powerful examples of resilience and leadership. Defying traditional norms, her namesake in the small Greek village of Filippiada started a government-supported school where low-income women could work and train others as artisans, while her grandmother on the southern coast of Lebanon dedicated her life to social work, helping fishermen fighting for labor rights, women and orphans in poverty, and refugees of war. These origins instilled in Giannakas a drive to champion women, to understand political and economic crises, and to grapple with improving social systems. Ritsa’s literal translation from the Greek, aptly, is “protector of man.”

Ritsa Giannakas, 22, is currently a Junior Professional Researcher (JPR) scholar affiliated with the Population Studies Center (PSC) at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. The JPR program, which provides hands-on social science research training to recent graduates, paired her with mentors JJ Prescott of the UM Law School and Sonja Starr of the University of Chicago to work on a project that is honing Giannakas’s experience as a population scientist, assessing the effects of automatic criminal record expungement in Michigan.

Route to Michigan

It was Giannakas’s mother and father who bridged the Mediterranean and the Midwest; they immigrated to take academic paths in the US and both serve as professors– of plant physiology and agricultural economics, respectively– at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln. 

Giannakas came close to entering UM’s Economics program as an undergraduate, but after the COVID pandemic hit during her senior year of high school, she instead took the full scholarship offered by Nebraska, where she cast herself a wide intellectual net. She majored in political science and economics, with minors in psychology, statistics, and math that enabled her to follow varied interests in developmental economics, international relations, and human rights. She completed a capstone project on protests around the world and the conditions that made them more or less effective, and wrote a senior thesis that suggested a correlation between economic uncertainty and the proliferation of pro-anorexic content on social media.

Her thesis advisor was PSC alum and labor economist Brenden Timpe, who pointed her to the JPR program at Michigan. 

With the JPR program, she was looking for the opportunity to learn what she knows now: That economics is the throughline of her broad and interdisciplinary interests, and that her love of statistics is in its application to social research, informing policies that can help people thrive.

Working with Prescott and Starr, Giannakas is investigating the effects of automatic criminal record expungement in Michigan. Her mentors’ influential prior work demonstrating the efficacy of petition-based expungement was cited in justifying the 2020 Michigan law that has since wiped more than a million eligible criminal convictions– primarily low-level, nonviolent crimes committed by residents without subsequent convictions– from public records. Giannakas will work with her mentors to assess the impacts of the automatic expungements on outcomes like employment and recidivism.

The Social Science Horizon

Now at the mid-point of the two-year JPR program, Giannakas says the vibrant academic community at the University of Michigan has allowed her to discern the paths she can take toward a social science horizon that is always broadening.

“The JPR program is unmatched,” said Giannakas. “My PIs have made sure that I’m always learning and encouraged me to go to classes and seminars at ISR, like the series offered by the Research Center for Group Dynamics, and across the university. Being in an institution where in every corner of campus there is someone trying to answer questions that I have never even conceived of in my life… that is really spectacular, and has opened my mind to all of the things that I could be doing right now, and that I could be doing in my future. It’s clarified that I know I’m on the right track.”

Following in the footsteps of her family, Giannakas plans to pursue a doctorate in economics after completing the JPR program, and to return to some of the topics at the nexus of gender and economic uncertainty that she pursued as an undergraduate but have new relevance today.

Reflecting on her family, Giannakas said her grandmothers’ experiences and strength helped shape her interests and her trajectory. “I’m very proud of where I’ve come from, and I am very passionate about the issues that face my community here in the states and ‘back home’ where my grandmothers have been advocates and very pro-woman. I feel like it’s hard to come from a lineage like that and not have that same drive.”

This post was written by Tevah Platt, communications manager for the Population Studies Center.