Ambassadors for Civic Engagement (ACE) Fellowship 2021-22

Unique opportunity to work on mis/disinformation

The Ambassadors for Civic Engagement (ACE) Fellowship provides an opportunity for graduate students to apply their education and skills to contribute to and improve the quality of life of people living in the Pittsburgh region through a long-term experiential fellowship with a community partner that works in public policy, governance, community organizing and activism, or philanthropy. 

Two diverse and highly competitive graduate-level ACE Fellows from a wide-range of backgrounds will work as a team with a community partner to address a specific organizational, policy, or community issue while increasing their social responsibility, heightening their understanding of human diversity, and learning from their peers.

2021-2022 Community Partner

This year, we partnered with the Pitt Disinformation Lab, part of the Pitt Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security.

Project Deliverables 

The ACE Fellows worked with the Pitt Disinformation Lab to support their mission to empower communities with tools for disinformation resilience. They explored the feasibility of a web portal for Western Pennsylvanians to share incidents of dis- and misinformation, created introductory materials for communities to understand dis- and misinformation, and developed secure, privacy-preserving storage and processes for data collection and curation.

Project Mentor

Beth Schwanke - Executive Director of Pitt Cyber

When was this fellowship offered?

It's offered every academic year, and in 2021-22, the fellowship ran from January 2022 through June 30, 2022.

Meet the 2021-2022 ACE Fellows

Photo of ACE Fellow, Aparna RamaniAparna Ramani is currently an Accelerated Bachelor's/Master's student at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public Health pursuing a Master of Public Health in Health Policy and Management. Her passions for health policy are deeply rooted within reproductive health, advocating for population health issues affecting marginalized groups, and sociomedical research. As an ACE Fellow, she was able to strengthen her interest in the intersection of clinical and community-conscious research, programming, and evaluation by understanding the role of mis- and dis-information on population health outcomes. Aparna aspires to become a health policy reformer to empower vulnerable communities to have a seat at the table in policymaking and decision-making spaces of health policy locally, nationally, and internationally. 

Photo of ACE Fellow, Lin YangLin Yang is a first-year Master's student at the University of Pittsburgh. He works on security and privacy issues. Lin has strong backgrounds in website development frameworks along with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript programming languages. In his free time, he enjoys singing and sporting, especially playing basketball! He also likes to play board games such as Catan Universe. He really enjoy working with an interdisciplinary team since it’s an amazing opportunity to gain knowledge in different fields and exchange ideas frequently.

Past ACE Placements