Grad Student - CER

Nathan Tilton

Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Nathan Anthony Tilton, MA, uses he/him pronouns. His disability pronouns are: service dog handler, chair user, neurodivergent, and disabled veteran. He is the Associate Director at UC Berkeley's Disability Lab and a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology. His research interests encompass disability anthropology, veteran health, critical disability studies, post colonial studies, crip time, and military biopolitics. Nate's research examines the ways in which institutions disable people, focusing on disabled veterans on Guam and the afterlives of former U.S. military bases in the Philippines....

Alex Torrez

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Alex K. Torrez (They/Them) is a Chancellor’s Fellow at UC Berkeley. They are broadly interested in questions at the nexus of Identity Classifications such as race, gender, and sexuality, Medical Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, and Organizations. Currently, these interests have led Alex to explore understandings of care in clinical settings, genomics, and the development of recruitment strategies for scientific study and organ donation.

Derek Wu

Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

Derek Wu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley (Designated Emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies) broadly exploring the effects of race and class inequalities on democracy in cities. His dissertation project uses archival work and more than 75 ethnographic interviews spanning five languages to explore how community organizing practices changed after the 1960s in an extremely diverse neighborhood of Oakland, CA, known as the Murder Dubs. He compares types of civil society organizations (such as churches and neighborhood councils) and...

Victor Xie

Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley

Victor Xie (he/him) is a PhD student in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and a recipient of the Chancellor’s Fellowship. He was born and raised in the Bay Area and received his B.A. in English and Asian American Studies at UCLA. His research is centered around how Chinese diasporic subjects in the US have used discourses of American freedom and democracy to gain legibility from the state, and how this entanglement has consequences for other racialized bodies living within and outside of US empire. He is particularly interested in political asylum, Cold War afterlives, and labor histories....

Mo'e Yaisikana

School of Social Welfare, UC Berkeley

Mo'e Yaisikana is a member of Cou (Indigenous Taiwanese) and a doctoral student at the School of Social Welfare. His intellectual interests concern care equity for Taiwan's older adults. He examines the construction and hindrance of care policies and service delivery system and aims to unravel a comprehensive, systematic, intersecting dynamic form of power to help explain challenges for Indigenous elders' accessibility to care service. His research includes the development of care service techniques, the intersection between governmental service and political democratization, and...

Chun-Chi Yang

School of Education, UC Berkeley

Chun-Chi (Sarah) Yang is a student in the School Psychology PhD Program in Berkeley School of Education. Before graduate school, she was a high school teacher in Taiwan for 20 years. After resigning from her teacher position, she attended the Post-Baccalaureate Program in Psychology Department at UC Berkeley. She then worked as a project coordinator in Hinshaw Lab and Family and Culture Lab at UC Berkeley. Currently, she is a second-year PhD student focused on adolescent research. As a teacher, she observed an upward trend of sleep problems and mental health difficulties in adolescents,...

Halle Young

Anthropology, UC Berkeley

Halle Young is a PhD candidate in the Joint Medical Anthropology program at UCSF-UC Berkeley, where she researches the therapeutic milieu of vulvovaginal pain. Her project explores what practices and ideals of intimacy and gender inspire cisgender women to engage in interventions toward penetration, especially when pain is present.

Zhehang Zhang

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Zhehang Zhang is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research examines Global China, borderland development, state power, and the political economy of transnational capitalism through qualitative and comparative methods. His current project, “Zones of Illegibility: Capital Flows, Transnational Labor, and Development in Global China,” studies how Chinese-led industrial development reshapes cross-border governance, institutional experimentation, and social life in China–Southeast Asia borderlands. More broadly, his work brings...

Ashley Zhou

Berkeley School of Education, UC Berkeley

Ashley Zhou is a student of the Joint Doctoral program in special education with UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University. Her research focuses on structures of race, class, gender, and disability in special education through the role of the paraprofessional. Analyzing historical archives, she examines the labor formation of paraprofessionals and special education teachers in the aftermath of Brown. Her work also incorporates ethnography to examine the consequences of this labor formation for contemporary challenges in special education. Through this investigation of educational...

Raquel Zitani-Rios

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Raquel Xitlali Zitani-Rios (She/They) is a PhD student interested in how cultural frameworks shape identity, public perceptions, civic engagement, and responses to social inequality, with particular attention to urban space, power, and belonging. Using qualitative methods, Raquel's research examines how community dynamics and local governance mediate struggles over inclusion and exclusion in the Bay Area.