Rachel Funk

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Political Science

Rachel Funk is a senior from Smithfield, Utah. She holds double majors in statistics and international studies and minors in mathematics and anticipatory intelligence.

Her ongoing research, which has been funded by the Peak Summer Research Fellowship and an Undergraduate Research and Creative Opportunities grant, deals with the fake news phenomenon and its consequences for democracy. Other research interests include the MENA region, sub-Saharan Africa, grassroots political movements, and quantitative research methods.

In addition to taking Arabic courses at USU, Rachel spent a semester in Rabat, Morocco intensively studying Modern Standard Arabic and the Darija dialect. Last fall, her article “Abusing Referenda to Consolidate and Extend Power: The Cases of Rwanda and Burundi” won a national cross-university competition and was published in the Social Science Research Council’s Democracy Papers blog. Rachel has been accepted into graduate school and will begin her Ph.D. program in the fall of 2020.