Grad Student - CER

Farnam Mohebi

Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley

Farnam Mohebi is a PhD student at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, and a researcher in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco. She has previously earned her MD and MPH degrees. Her research focuses on the intersection of professionals and emerging technologies, drawing from the fields of medical sociology, organizational theory, and science and technology studies. She is particularly fascinated by the evolving relationship between physicians and artificial intelligence, the phenomenon of physician influencers, and...

Read more about Farnam Mohebi

Bernardo Moreno Peniche

Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Bernardo is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology. He studies the (dis)locations of tropicality in relation to the emergence of zoonoses and vector-borne diseases in the Global North. He focuses on Chagas, a parasitic disease transmitted by an insect vector, that has gained its epidemiological relevance in the US through its association with human migration from Latin America despite growing evidence of local transmission cycles that have continuously been part of US landscapes. He asks about the effects that framing Chagas disease as a foreign threat have on public health policy and clinical...

Read more about Bernardo Moreno Peniche

Jimena Perez

Geography, UC Berkeley

Jimena Perez is a community-engaged scholar, NSF GRFP Fellow, and Geography Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation explores the L.A. River—known to the Tongva as paayme paxaayt—as a site of memory, resistance, and repair. Raised in Southeast Los Angeles, she witnessed the River’s confinement in concrete, mirroring the struggles of nearby working-class communities. Rather than centering loss, her ethnographic research highlights the visions and practices of residents across L.A. County who challenge dominant planning narratives and reimagine infrastructure. Jimena’s...

Read more about Jimena Perez

Janiya Peters

University of California, Berkeley

Janiya Peters is a PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Information advised by Deirdre Mulligan. Her work explores the ways in which generative text-to-image models compromise visual creators’ intellectual property rights, and how visual creators adopt resistance strategies to retain agency over their intellectual property, labor and compensation. She identifies sites of dispute between stakeholders, and discerns individual and collective action towards repossessing appropriated works. Her work proposes policy interventions at the intersection of copyright, data labor and creative...

Read more about Janiya Peters

Irene Franco Rubio

Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

Irene Franco Rubio is a scholar-activist, organizer, and first-generation Ph.D. student in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and New Media. Her research examines intersectional coalition building and cross-cultural solidarity within multiracial social movements, focusing on how and why coalitions emerge and sustain themselves amid the challenges of movement siloing in the U.S. Southwest. Grounded in Comparative Ethnic Studies and Sociology, she employs a combination...

Read more about Irene Franco Rubio

Meriam Salem

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Meriam Salem is a PhD student investigating the intersection of behavioral health and legal systems. Her research draws on the Duboisian question, "how does it feel to be a problem?" Currently, her work investigates how governments manage behavioral health and the encroachment of national security logics in healthcare systems. She was recently awarded the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholars fellowship.

Read more about Meriam Salem

Maya Sapienza

Geography, UC Berkeley

Maya is a PhD student in Geography who studies the relationships between gentrification, Black identity formation, bureaucracy, geographies of urban justice, and struggles over public (and private) space. In particular, she investigates how these entanglements might be instructive for alternative futures. She looks at the relationship between local and federal government policies that have unevenly impacted Black neighborhoods, and the ways Black residents resist physical and cultural displacement in their attempts to reclaim their neighborhoods. Historically, local...