As any good mentor does, Kasey Buckles helps her graduate students produce the best work they can. She keeps them on schedule and refines their research questions. She points them toward analytical tools and connects them with other resources.
But she also knows that there’s more to life than writing an economics dissertation.
“Our students can very easily fall into the trap of thinking their worth is all about their work and how their work is perceived,” she said. “I really try at every stage to think about them as a scholar but also as a person — people who have families and interests and spiritual and mental lives.”
The Quinn and Jean Stepan Family College Professor has served on nine completed dissertation committees, chairing or co-chairing five of them, in her time at the University of Notre Dame. She’s currently on three dissertation committees, chairing two.
In recognition of her support for her students as well as their professional success, Buckles is the recipient of the 2026 College of Arts & Letters Graduate Student Mentorship Award. This honor is given annually to a tenured faculty member who has demonstrated outstanding mentorship and care to graduate students.
“She gives students the freedom to pursue their own interests but steers them in good directions; she pushes students to push themselves, without being pushy; she is warm and caring, while also being incisive and direct,” wrote Eric Sims, the William J. and Dorothy K. O’Neill Professor and chair of the Department of Economics, in a letter nominating Buckles for the award. “This is a difficult balance to strike.”
The award will be presented to Buckles at the College’s spring faculty meeting at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, May 7, at McKenna Hall. At the same meeting, Jeff Harden, the Andrew J. McKenna Family College Professor in the Department of Political Science, will receive the Arts & Letters Research Award.
“This is one of the highlights of my career,” Buckles said. “I have really great colleagues in my own department and elsewhere in the College who take graduate education really seriously, so to be recognized among them for work that I think is so important — it’s a real honor.”
Trading inspiration
One of Buckles’ favorite aspects about being a professor is that she gets to be a permanent student, learning something new every day. And the learning doesn’t stop when she’s working with graduate students.
In fact, she believes the best kind of mentoring relationship is a two-way street.
“You have to think as a mentee, ‘What am I bringing to the table?’” she said. “Bringing enthusiasm, your questions, your ideas — those are the kinds of conversations that make the meetings something I really look forward to.”
“I love seeing our graduate students flourish when they leave us. As excited as I am about my research, I am very sure that any lasting impact I have is going to come through the students.”
— Kasey Buckles, Quinn and Jean Stepan Family College Professor
Buckles’ mentees rarely disappoint. She’s inspired by their energy and the insights they bring to her research, which centers on the economics of the family. And she’s hopeful that her students’ contributions will inspire and inform other economists.
The Census Tree, a tool she dedicated several years to developing, is another way Buckles assists her peers and mentees. The database contains over 700 million links between 1850–1940 U.S. census records, and it is compiled using a combination of genealogy data, machine learning tools, and other linking methods. It enables researchers to track individuals over almost a century, allowing them to answer questions about how certain events affect people over the long term.
Because of the Census Tree, much of Buckles’ research has shifted to focus on economic history, and she’s already used it to write a paper on the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status, addressing the question, “To what extent do the circumstances of your birth determine your own outcomes?” She is currently utilizing it for research on the effects of Prohibition on women and children.
Ph.D. candidate and Buckles mentee Haley Wilbert helped build the Census Tree as a research assistant and has used it in her research, too. Another mentee, Henry Downes ’25 Ph.D., is currently an assistant professor in the University of Georgia’s economics department and has used the tool for his own research.
But that tool is just one of the things he’s gained from knowing Buckles.
“She has helped me to become a better version of myself,” Downes wrote. “Her mentorship has been a constant in my life for over five years and has always been a force for good.”
Making a better future for economists
Like most scholars who’ve found success, Buckles can point to people who were important mentors in her own life.
As an undergraduate at the University of Kentucky, Buckles was mentored by Gail Hoyt, then one of the few women in the school’s economics department. Hoyt took Buckles to the Midwest Economics Association conference, where she presented her senior thesis — her first experience at a professional conference, and something she was sure to mention when she became president of the association in 2022.
In graduate school, Buckles had more difficulty finding mentors, which she attributes partly to being intimidated by faculty and partly to a lack of accessibility.
“I have often looked back on that experience and thought I could’ve gotten a lot more out of it if it had been easier to make mentoring relationships,” she said.
That bit of hindsight informs the way Buckles approaches being a mentor now. She makes it very difficult for her students to avoid her by scheduling weekly meetings and providing a supportive, nonjudgmental environment. She doesn’t want them to miss out on mentorship as she did.
Buckles’ experiences have also fostered a sense of obligation toward other women in economics, a historically male-dominated field.
To help improve things, Buckles served as associate chair and director of mentoring from 2022–24 on the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP), which has worked to advocate for women in economics for over 50 years.
Under her leadership, CSWEP created a peer-to-peer mentoring group for mid-career economists, provided workshops for graduate students, and worked to find ways of attracting more women to economics as undergraduates. Now Buckles has moved to the association’s Committee on Professional Climate, continuing work toward a more inclusive economics profession.
“We have really benefited when women more senior than us have gone out of their way to make it easier,” she said. “Now it’s our turn to make it easier for the people coming behind us.”
For Buckles, bettering the future of the field, one student at a time, is another reward of mentorship. She proudly watched her first graduate mentee, Beth Munnich, become a full professor at the University of Louisville and touch the lives of students there. One of Munnich’s undergraduates, Emily Davis, is now Buckles’ newest graduate mentee at Notre Dame — a multigenerational success story.
“I love seeing our graduate students flourish when they leave us,” Buckles said. “As excited as I am about my research, I am very sure that any lasting impact I have is going to come through the students.”
Originally published by at al.nd.edu on May 04, 2026.