MSU PLS PhD candidate awarded APSA Latino Scholarship

October 24, 2025 - Karessa Weir

MSU PLS PhD candidate Raymundo Lopez has been awarded a scholarship from the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) Fund for Latino Scholarship.  

The award will fund his research on studying videos of U.S. Congressional floor speeches to evaluate how members negotiate and perform their social identities in real time, the APSA announcement said.  

“The Fund for Latino Scholarship will support efforts to launch an online survey experiment in a dedicated chapter of his dissertation,” APSA wrote. “Ray is committed to public scholarship and digital storytelling.” 

Lopez is the founder of Atom Laboratories, a YouTube channel that translates political science research into accessible video essays, candidate profiles, and analyses of contemporary political issues. His work bridges scholarship and practice, with the goal of broadening civic understanding and fostering inclusive political discourse. Lopez is a Stanford University, USC POIR Predoctoral Summer Institute and Ronald McNair alum. 

“Ray is well-deserving of this award. He is resourceful, humble, hard-working, thoughtful, and this project fits his passion for analyzing how voters react to candidates of different backgrounds,” said MSU PLS Assistant Professor Eric Gonzalez Juenke. “More importantly, Ray’s experiments will help us understand what kinds of shortcuts voters use to think about candidates with various overlapping identities. The work helps explain representation gaps and may influence both political parties to recruit and support historically excluded candidates to run for office.” 

Specifically, the scholarship will help Lopez launch an online survey experiment examining how voters respond to different types of intersectional appeals in simulated elections. This research builds on the racial priming hypothesis by applying an intersectional lens to the strategies that women of color candidates use when appealing to broad, cross-racial and socioeconomic constituencies, Lopez said. Racial priming is a theory that media and campaign content can make racial attitudes more important factors in Americans’ political evaluations. 

 “The award is a testament to the support I’ve received from my advisor, Dr. Eric Juenke, the incredibly supportive members of my committee—Jenny, Nazita, and Matt—and from my fellow PhD colleagues, whose feedback and camaraderie constantly push my work in new directions," Lopez said. “Big thanks to APSA."