Alagia Justice Cirolia is a combined MSW/PhD student in UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare. Their research interests center on improving school equity through the implementation of school-based mental health and wellness programs serving marginalized youth & families, particularly through research-practice partnerships. In addition, Cirolia hones their clinical interests in trauma-informed care and school social work. Cirolia holds a BA in Cognitive Science with High Honors from UC Berkeley. With support from their faculty mentor, Dr. Valerie Shapiro, Cirolia aims to conduct...
Ángel Ross is currently a PhD student in sociology with a designated emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies. He conducts research at the intersection of (sub)urban sociology, race and inequality, housing, and policing. Their current project empirically tests evidence of racial threat and renter threat in California suburbs with a focus on communities on the receiving end of gentrification and displacement from the coastal urban core. Before pursuing a PhD, they received a Master of City Planning from the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley and BAs in sociology and economics...
Benjamin Fields is a PhD student in Sociology at UC Berkeley. A health- oriented social scientist, he wants to focus his research on a social understanding of diet and its relationship to well-being, looking beyond the physiological definition of food towards one that includes social, cultural, political, and economic considerations. “The Computational Social Science Training Program will develop me to lead the next revolution of research through big-data and geospatial oriented approaches....
Caitlin Chan is a PhD student in the division of epidemiology at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, under the mentorship of Dr. Jennifer Ahern. Her research seeks to explore the epidemiological underpinnings of transmission of trauma through communities by untangling the relationships between violence, trauma, economic adversity, and institutional marginalization. She is particularly interested in understanding who is most likely to be missing from conventional sources of epidemiological data on violence, and how to improve public health surveillance of these vulnerable individuals....
Christina Misunas is a PhD student in Demography at UC Berkeley. Her research to date has focused on the intersection of gender, health, and education in low- and middle-income countries. For the past five years, she has worked with Population Council and UNICEF’s Data Analysis Unit on research around girls’ education, child marriage, and adolescent childbearing. Prior to working in research, Christina spent several years in Washington, DC, working on global advocacy and programming for sexual and reproductive health with Marie Stopes International and the Open Society Foundations. Misunas...
Daniel Lobo is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology with an emphasis in Political Economy at UC Berkeley. He is broadly interested in how culture, or the unspoken “rules of the game,” reproduces inequality within a system of racial capitalism. At the individual level, he is interested in documenting and measuring the extent to which cultural capital and social capital enable or constrain opportunities for intergenerational mobility. At the organizational level, he is interested in documenting and measuring the extent to which culturally-based selection and promotion processes...
Elizabeth Breen is a PhD student in the Sociology and Demography departments at UC Berkeley. Her research interests center on the social and historical determinants of human health, particularly the distribution and repercussions of infectious disease. Her current project examines the internalization of neoliberal economic ideology and its effects on workers’ fundamental social ties, like those to family, friends, and broader communities, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Breen's faculty mentors at UC Berkeley are Professors Christopher Muller and Laura Enriquez. Breen...
Elleni Hailu is a PhD student in the Division of Epidemiology at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health. Her interests are in addressing the ways in which place-based markers of structural racism (ex. mass incarceration) are biologically embedded across the lifecourse to influence racial inequities in cardiovascular and adverse maternal health outcomes. She aims to employ interdisciplinary theories and biopsychosocial frameworks along with robust and novel data analytic methods to conduct research that informs policies intended to dismantle processes that maintain the cycle of health...
Jessie Harney is a PhD candidate and Graduate Student Researcher at the Goldman School of Public Policy. Her research interests are in criminal justice system reform with a specific focus on mental health and improving outcomes for those whose lives are impacted by the carceral system. She holds degrees in Psychology (BS) from Truman State University, Biostatistics (MS) from Washington University in St. Louis, and Public Policy (MPP) from the University of California, Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy.
Krista Neumann is a PhD student in Epidemiology at Berkeley’s School of Public Health. Her goal is to apply her training in Mathematics to social epidemiological questions focused on reducing health disparities. Neumann’s current research interests aim to answer the causal question: which policies, programs and interventions most successfully reduce systematically embedded barriers to health for marginalized and low-income communities. She’s particularly interested in food and nutrition...
