Challey Spotlight: Sheryl Du

Background and academic journey

Sheryl Du combines her knowledge of economics and history with a strong interest in how institutions influence people's lives. Growing up in China, she was inspired by her father's work in finance to pursue economics, despite her fascination with history and her childhood dream of studying archaeology. That tension stayed with her until graduate school, when she realized she did not have to choose between the two.

After completing her BA in economics and psychology at Brandeis University and an MS in applied economics at Johns Hopkins University, Du began her PhD in economics at the University of Connecticut. While searching for an advisor, she noticed a professor specializing in business history. It occurred to her that she could merge her rigorous economic training with her passion for historical narratives and archival research. As a Chinese scholar with language skills and contextual knowledge that many others lack, she recognized a unique opportunity to make a meaningful contribution.

Research focus and insights

At the Challey Institute, Sheryl’s work centers on how policy environments shape economic outcomes for different groups, especially those with lower incomes.

Her first project explores how interstate migration relates to economic freedom and income in the U.S. She investigates how people move between states and how this interacts with state-level economic freedom scores and income growth. While some argue that greater economic freedom increases inequality, her findings suggest that higher economic freedom can lead to higher incomes, particularly for those at the lower end of the income distribution. She attributes her focus on the impact of policy on the "worst off" to discussions at Challey, especially John Bitzan’s emphasis on the real-life effects of policy changes.

Her second line of work looks at trade deficits in a world of global supply chains. She is interested in how much of a country’s exports are genuinely produced within its borders and how much comes from value added in other countries that gets counted again when the final product is shipped. By digging into value-added trade data and replicating prior work, she examines whether headline trade deficits overstate economic imbalances. She is also considering how tariffs and trade policy affect firms in North Dakota and is developing a survey to ask local businesses how trade tensions and tariff changes affect their costs, planning, and long-term investments.

Broader impact and public engagement

Across her projects, Sheryl hopes her work will help people rethink some common assumptions about economic freedom, inequality, and trade. She wants her research on migration and income to encourage policymakers and the public to look beyond simple inequality statistics and ask a deeper question: are policies helping the most vulnerable people, or only those at the top?

Du is especially interested in how her work might inform decisions in places like North Dakota, where firms and workers can feel the effects of national and international policy very directly. Whether the question is how economic freedom relates to income growth or how tariffs filter through supply chains, she hopes her research will offer a clearer picture that decision-makers can use to support better lower- and middle-income households.

Professional motivation and future goals

For Sheryl, one of the most rewarding parts of research is working through problems that initially do not make sense. Data can be messy, hard to find, or slow to line up with theory. Sometimes, early results are counterintuitive. Rather than discouraging her, those puzzles are what keep her engaged. She enjoys digging into why something looks wrong, checking assumptions, and gradually finding an explanation that fits both the data and economic intuition.

That same mindset shapes how she thinks about future projects. She is interested in spending more time on policy areas that directly affect students and young people, particularly student loans and college affordability. While teaching a “Writing in Economics” course, she noticed that many of her students chose to write about student debt and scholarships. Their essays underscored how central these issues are to their ability to build stable, flourishing lives. That experience left her wanting to understand better the structure of student loan programs and how policy changes might ease the burden on those just starting.

She aims to develop a research agenda linking institutional details, meticulous data work, and real-world impact to enhance opportunity and human flourishing.

Beyond research

Outside of her work as a researcher, she describes herself first as a reader gravitating towards history, biography, and nonfiction. She often finds herself drawn to periods of intense change, such as the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries or the Second World War. Recently, she has been reading historian Ian Toll’s books on the Pacific theater of World War II, reflecting her interest in how technology, institutions, and power shifted during that era.

Increasingly, she finds herself most interested in stories about ordinary people rather than famous figures. Some of her recent favorites include a book that examines child maltreatment in Japan through a single, tragic case, and another that follows three everyday Koreans during the 2015 MERS outbreak, tracing not only the illness itself but also the stigma and hardship that lingered afterward. In these narratives, she sees the same questions that drive her research: how institutions treat those with the least power and how policy choices ripple through the lives of “small people.”

When she is not reading, Sheryl enjoys watching TV series and, occasionally, shopping. Whether she is working through a tricky dataset or turning the pages of a history book, she keeps her focus on the people whose stories sit behind the numbers.