Leadership & Staff
Kurt Organista
Director, Institute for the Study for Societal Issues
Kurt C. Organista, Ph.D., is Professor of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studies Latino psychosocial and health problems. He teaches courses on race, ethnic relations & social welfare, as well as social work practice with Latino populations. He conducts research on HIV prevention with Latino migrant laborers and is editor of the book HIV Prevention with Latinos: Theory, research and practice, published in 2012 by Oxford University Press, and author of Solving Latino Psychosocial and Health Problems: Theory, Research, & Practice (2nd ed.), published by Oxford University Press in 2023. He serves on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Community Psychology, the Hispanic Journal of the Behavioral Sciences, and the Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Diversity in Social Work. From 2004-2008 Organista was appointed to the Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council at the National Institutes of Health, and from 2010 to 2015 he was Principal Investigator of a federal R01 grant from the NIAAA to develop and test a structural environmental model of alcohol-related HIV risk in Latino migrant day laborers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Organista served as trustee of the Latino Community Foundation (2015 to 2022) and as trustee and Vice Chair of the San Francisco Community Foundation (2008 to 2018). In 2018, he received the Leon Henkin Citation for Excellence in Mentoring Underrepresented Students, and in 2020 he was named the American Cultures Teacher of the Year. In 2020, Organista was inducted as a Fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, and in 2021 he was awarded the Harry and Riva Specht Endowed Chair in Publicly Supported Social Services.
Professor Organista is Director of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues. A long-time faculty affiliate of the Institute, he previously served as chair of the Center for Latino Policy Research (now known as the Latinx Research Center) from 2001 to 2003 and as Interim Chair of ISSI's Latinx Research Center during 2024-25.
Deborah Freedman Lustig
Associate Director, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues
Deborah Freedman Lustig is a cultural anthropologist whose research has focused on gender and education in the United States and Kenya, where she was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in 2004-5. Lustig earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan. Her articles about teenage mothers have been published in the journals Anthropology and Education Quarterly and Childhood and in the edited volume Childhood, Youth, and Social Work in Transformation: Implications for Policy and Practice (Columbia University Press, 2009). Her recent research on risk and violence among young adults coming of age in Oakland, California has been published in Children and Youth Services Review and in the edited volume Education and the Risk Society: Theories, Discourse, and Risk Identities in Education Contexts (Sense Publishers 2012) and is available here(link is external). From 2006-2011 Lustig coordinated the research and training activities of the Center on Culture, Immigration, and Youth Violence Prevention, a project of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues. In addition to helping direct the overall research mission of the Institute, she is the Academic Coordinator for the ISSI research centers, as well one of the Co-Directors of the Graduate Fellows Program
Pablo Gonzalez
Graduate Fellows Program Co-Director, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues
In addition to serving as Gradute Fellows Program Co-Director, Dr. Pablo Gonzalez is a continuing lecturer in Chicanx and Latinx Studies and Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. He is the recent recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award (2022). He is also the recipient of the Chancellor's Public Service Award for Community Engaged Teaching. Dr. Gonzalez holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in Anthropology and a BA in Chicano Studies from UC Berkeley. His research focuses on the impact of transnational indigenous social movements on Chicano activism in the United States and the relationships between race, migration, and dispossession in migrant Latinx communities in the US. His research interests include social movements, urban ethnography, identity formation, and racial formation.
Maxwell Vanderwarker
Chief Administrative Officer, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues
Maxwell Vanderwarker is ISSI’s Chief Administrative Officer. He received his BA in English from UC Berkeley, where he was involved in LGBT+ leadership with Oscar Wilde House. After graduation, he transitioned into Human Resources and finance and worked with a variety of small tech startups in the Bay Area, at the UC Berkeley College of Natural Resources, and as the Operations Officer at the UCSF HEAL Initiative. Maxwell is currently a MFA in creative writing candidate at San Francisco State University, with a focus on writing transgressive, boundary breaking LGBT+ literature.
Katie Owensby
Program Coordinator, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues
Katie Owensby is a program coordinator for ISSI. She came to ISSI after serving as an Undergraduate Academic Advisor for the Society & Environment major in the College of Natural Resources at UC Berkeley. Prior to working in CNR, Katie worked for Cal Alumni Association as their Marketing Data and Reporting Manager. Katie earned her BA in Psychology from University of Redlands and her MA in Counseling Psychology from University of San Francisco. She has two children, a daughter in high school, and a son who is a first year in college on the east coast. She and her family recently relocated from the Bay Area to Washington State. Katie enjoys hiking with her beloved Golden Retriever, Hana, reading, and spending time playing games and watching movies with her family. She has a deep love for UC Berkeley and cannot imagine working anywhere else.
Robin Marsh
Senior Researcher, Institute for the Study of Societal Issues
Robin Marsh joined ISSI in 2014 as a Senior Researcher. She is a socio-economist with over 25 years of experience in international agriculture and rural development. Marsh received her PhD from the Food Research Institute, Stanford University. She subsequently worked for the World Vegetable Center on socio-economic and nutritional benefits of home/community gardening, and for the Food and Agriculture Organization on local institution strengthening for food security and sustainable rural livelihoods. Marsh joined UC Berkeley in 2000 as Academic Coordinator of the Center for Sustainable Resource Development and Co-Director of the Beahrs Environmental Leadership Program (2000-2013). She has been a lecturer at UC Berkeley's College of Natural Resources since 2003, teaching in the field of Population, Environment & Development, and is Affiliate Faculty with The Blum Center for Developing Economies.