Wu Receives Emerging Scholar Award

Viviana Chiu Sik Wu
Viviana Chiu Sik Wu

Viviana Chiu Sik Wu, assistant professor at the UMass Amherst School of Public Policy, has received a 2020 Emerging Scholar Award from the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, or ARNOVA.

The award “recognize[s] the potentials of the next generation of nonprofit scholars and practitioners,” according to ARNOVA, and “is designed to support the efforts of emerging scholars and practitioners to foster dissemination of research into practice and enhance involvement in the creation of usable knowledge.”

“I’m very honored and appreciative that ARNOVA has selected me as an emerging scholar and recognizes my ongoing research endeavors,” Wu said. “I look forward to bringing more impactful research to the field and offering both strategic and critical lenses to understand how philanthropy and nonprofits interact with today’s increasingly unequal and divided society.”

"Viviana is an accomplished emerging scholar and we're excited that she is part of our faculty," said School of Public Policy director Alasdair Roberts. "She adds to the school's growing strength in the field of nonprofit studies."

Wu joined the School of Public Policy this fall. Her research interests include philanthropy and nonprofit management, inequality and place-based disadvantage, engagement and advocacy on social media, computational methods, and text as data. Earlier this year she received a research grant from the Generosity Commission for a project “The ‘Matthew Effect’ in Generosity: Examining the Impact on Nonprofit Capacity Across Place and Time,” which looks at the “philanthropic gap” across the US.

She is the managing editor of “Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly.” Her coauthored paper “The Place Dilemma of Community Foundations: ‘Equalizing’ the Inequality?” received the ARNOVA’s 2017 Best Conference Paper Award. She received her Ph.D. in social welfare from the University of Pennsylvania.

Wu will be presented with her award at ARNOVA’s virtual annual conference in November.