Pi Sigma Alpha, the National Political Science Honor Society, announced the election of Dr. Taeko Hiroi, Dr. Alecia Hoffman, Dr. Dwaine Jengelley, Dr. Neil Ruiz, Clarissa Unger, and Dr. Everett A. Vieira III as members of the 2022-2024 Executive Council during the organization’s biennial business meeting. Please join us in welcoming them, and we invite you to learn more about them in the information below.

Taeko Hiroi is Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at The University of Texas at El Paso and an affiliated faculty member of the Center for Inter-American and Border Studies and Asian Studies Program. Her research and teaching areas include comparative political institutions, legislative politics, presidential and legislative coalitions, electoral systems and political representation, governance and accountability, democratization, and comparative and international political economy. She has been the advisor for the Epsilon Epsilon chapter of Pi Sigma Alpha since 2008 and in that time, the chapter has received 7 Pi Sigma Alpha Best Chapter awards.

Alecia D. Hoffman is an associate professor of political science at Alabama State University. She earned her Master of Arts from Auburn University and Doctor of Philosophy from Clark Atlanta University. Her areas of research interest include the development of the Global South, international relations/political economy, foreign policy, migration/trafficking, and Sino-African relations. She is the author, co-author, editor, and co-editor of several publications in edited peer-reviewed works, such as Human Trafficking in Africa and China in Africa. She has been the advisor for the Alpha Gamma Psi chapter of Pi Sigma Alpha since 2016. 

Dwaine Jengelley is a political scientist in the John Martinson Honors College at Purdue University, West Lafayette IN. His research interests include media and terrorism, the factors that influence how journalists report the news, and media coverage of race. His work has been published in journals such Terrorism and Political Violence and Politics Groups and Identities. He also directs the Interdisciplinary Sports Research Generator at the John Martinson Honors College. Dr. Jengelley is also a member of Pi Sigma Alpha.

Neil G. Ruiz is associate director of race and ethnicity research at the Pew Research Center. He studies the international movement of people across borders, high-skilled immigration to the U.S. and around the world, and utilizes a mixed methods approach (demographic, qualitative and survey) to studying Asian Americans and other rare populations. Dr. Ruiz is also the founding chair of AAPOR’s Asian American and Pacific Islander Research and Affinity group. He is a political economist with a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master’s degree from Oxford University, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley. He was inducted as a member of Pi Sigma Alpha as an undergraduate student.