Foster Echia ’28 has been learning from top-notch economics experts in Washington, DC, and Chicago, Illinois, this summer as part of the 9-week program.
By Cara Nixon
July 14, 2026
Reedies don’t tend to settle in the summer.
Instead, they often find ways outside of the classroom to learn, grow, and bring their new ideas and insights back to campus with them come fall. Just ask Foster Echia ’28, who was selected and received funding for a highly competitive national program this summer, the .
EDE+, based at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, is designed to introduce early undergraduate students to advanced research in economics and other quantitative social sciences. Through the 9-week program hosted in Washington, DC, and Chicago, Illinois, Foster has been able to attend classes at the Hutchins Center at Brookings and the University of Chicago, receive mentorship from people working in economics, and hear from top experts in the field, like former Chair of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke and Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook.
Foster was at first skeptical about what he might get out of the program. But Professor Denise Hare [economics], who he is conducting summer research with, encouraged him to go for it. “I never regretted it,” he says.
“Reed is a research-focused school, and the writing and analysis I've learned in classes here carried straight into the program,” Foster says.
According to Foster, the best part of the experience has been the people he’s met. Forty-three other students from colleges across the country attend EDE+ alongside him, and Foster says their conversations about policy and research have taught him as much as the sessions themselves.
For the rest of the institute, Foster will be focusing on reproducing results from a Chicago Booth professor’s paper and presenting at the PREDOC—Pathways to Research and Doctoral Careers—conference in Chicago at the end of July.
“It's the closest I've come to doing research from start to finish,” he says.