PEP Program Selects Taqi Raza and Jared Starr as Fellows
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How well do researchers communicate their most vital and beneficial findings to journalists, the public, and lawmakers? That is the raison d'être of the UMass Amherst Public Engagement Project (PEP) Program, which has chosen Taqi Raza, an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and Jared Starr, the executive director of the UMass Energy Transition Institute, as two of its eight PEP Fellows for 2026. The PEP Fellows Program facilitates connections between Fellows and lawmakers in the U.S. Congress and Massachusetts State House, as well as with journalists, practitioners, and others to share their research beyond the walls of academia.
As part of the PEP Program, the eight new PEP Fellows will each receive a stipend and technical training in communicating with non-academic audiences. PEP Fellows will meet twice per month during the 2026 spring semester, attending panels, skill-building workshops, and personal-mentoring sessions offered by faculty, communications experts from University Relations, and others experienced with public engagement.
As Raza says about the engagement plan for his own PEP Fellowship, “Through structured training, public-facing writing, media engagement, and sustained involvement with policymakers and communities, I hope to advance the broader mission of public-interest technology and make the invisible machinery of our digital world more understandable, accountable, and trustworthy to everyone.”
As Raza explains the backstory to his plan, his research “sits at the intersection of technology, security, and public trust. Every day, billions of people depend on digital-payment systems that incorporate security, mobile-network technology, and financial infrastructure to carry out transactions securely. These building blocks are so deeply embedded in the payment lifecycle that most users do not notice them as fragmented elements.”
Raza says that his work uncovers how the financial systems and processes behind payment services can have significant effects on everyday users. Their conflicting operations produce unauthorized charges on credit cards, leaked private information, and failed transactions at critical moments when payments are needed most.
“I study these problems not as isolated bugs,” says Raza, “but as symptoms of a deeper principle: Security depends on banking systems doing what they are supposed to do, every time.”
Raza says that he communicates these findings to a broad audience with this simple message: “Security is ultimately about ensuring that everyday technologies behave correctly under real-world assumptions.”
As Raza concludes, “The root cause is that financial systems were not designed with the realistic threat model in mind: mobility, failures, delays, mismatched assumptions between components, and unexpected interactions. My research shows how these real-world factors break systems in surprising ways, and more importantly, how we can redesign them to be safer and more dependable.”
Starr’s research analyzes how economic inequality – particularly at the very top of the income-distribution system – shapes the circulation of environmental benefits and can harm people throughout the global economy.
As director of the Energy Transition Institute (ETI), Starr helms its mission of transitioning rapidly away from fossil fuels. It’s a process, as the ETI says, which “presents a massive opportunity to design and choose resilient pathways to a net-zero energy system. We believe this transformation can lead to new industries, job creation, and broadly shared benefits for all members of society.”
As Starr says about his PEP engagement plan, “Broadly speaking, my research analyzes the connections between wealth and climate change. This work matters because extreme economic inequality and climate change are two of the most powerful global forces shaping our social, political, and economic systems. By shining a light on how these two forces are linked, my work has the potential to impact public discourse and inform the development of more equitable climate policies.”
According to Starr, “A key message of my work is that extremely wealthy households play a much larger role in climate-altering emissions than is commonly known, and that, by understanding this disparity, we can develop novel policy solutions such as a wealth-based carbon tax to equitably fund the transition to a decarbonized economy.”
Starr concludes that “The two key audiences for this work are a public audience, who can use this knowledge to advocate for more equitable climate solutions, and policy makers, who can draft more equitable policy solutions to achieve a just energy transition and stable climate.”
The PEP Program will give Raza and Starr and the university’s other PEP Fellows a golden opportunity to apply their best research to vital societal problems and engage lawmakers and the public at large in adopting their wise research applications for the good of all.
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Taqi Raza
