USF Graduate Students Co-Author Study, Land Jobs

A graduate student in economics at USF, Cosgrove contacted economics Professor Bruce Wydick and asked to get involved in his research. That led Cosgrove to a summer in Delhi, India, collecting data in temperatures above 100 degrees. Which led him to learn R and Python. Which led to his master’s thesis.

Upon graduation in 2023, Cosgrove landed a position at Open Research, a nonprofit research organization in San Francisco. He’s now a software engineer at T-Mobile in Seattle.

“Without that first step into research, I don’t know if I would have ended up where I am,” Cosgrove said.

Cosgrove was one of eight USF graduate students to co-author a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nexus, a peer-reviewed journal from Oxford University Press. The study was led by USF economics professor Alessandra Cassar, with Wydick as a co-investigator along with faculty from other institutions

Co-author Nikita Tkachenko MS ’24 said that working on this research paved the way for him. He now runs Evalyn, a company that uses AI to audit customer-service conversations. He also teaches prompt engineering at Golden Gate University and wrote a book, Data Insight Foundations: Step-by-Step Data Analysis with R, published by Apress in April 2025.

The USF researchers set out to determine whether high temperatures affect economic decision-making. Over three years, student teams traveled to Colombia, India, Kenya, Mexico, and the United States, working with 1,636 subjects placed in small groups in rooms where temperature ranged between 64 and 93 degrees. Participants were asked how much of a cash gift they were willing to transfer to others in the room.

“We found that while high temperatures do not significantly influence economic decisions or prosocial behavior, there were clear links between gender and prosociality, with women behaving in more egalitarian ways than men and demonstrating less competitiveness than men,” Wydick said.

The other USF student co-authors were John Chetwynd, Alexander Courtman, Andrew Hall, Stephanie Hermoso, Scott Klaus, and Antonia Sottile.