Grad Student - ISSI

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...

Kameswari (Kamu) Potharaju

UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program

Kamu is a medical and graduate student in the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program. Her research interests focus on the integration of social care into clinical care, with an emphasis on increasing basic needs access for historically underresourced communities.

Deborah Qu

Psychology, UC Berkeley

Deborah Qu is a graduate student in the Social and Personality Psychology program at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses broadly on emotions and emotion regulation, explored through multiple lenses. Her research investigates the automatization of cognitive change strategies, the role of psychological distancing in emotion regulation, and how individual traits like Agreeableness interact with situational factors to shape emotional responses. Deborah also studies bicultural experiences among American immigrants, such as the way Chinese Americans regulate their emotions when shifting between...

Ogi Radic

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Adriana P. Ramírez

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Adriana P. Ramírez is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her research interests revolve around migration, citizenship, Latin America, political sociology, and race and ethnicity. The influence of growing up as a migrant student between Mexico and the U.S. is evident in her work, which explores transnational migration dynamics. Her current work examines how young return migrants adapt to different spheres of Mexican society and formulate their identity and sense of belonging across contexts of reception in the states of Oaxaca and...

Benji Reade Malagueño

Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, UC Berkeley

Benji is a PhD Candidate in UC Berkeley's Department Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM). Their current research integrates geospatial, econometric, and hydrological analyses to examine drivers of inequities in access to water, focusing on the impacts of water policy, land ownership, and agricultural exports in central Chile and California's Central Valley. They are passionate about using research, data science, and GIS to empower social movements, inform policy, and fight for a more just food-water system.

Before joining ESPM, Benji studied environmental justice,...

Reiley Reed

School of Social Welfare, UC Berkeley

Reiley Reed (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare. Her research interests include the historical and ongoing role of social work in perpetuating reproductive oppression, pregnancy criminalization and surveillance, and power dynamics in health care. Her mixed-methods dissertation research explores the role of social workers in reporting abortion and substance use in pregnancy to government authorities. Previously, she worked at the Person-Centered Reproductive Health Program at UC San Francisco where she managed research projects focused on patient-...

Everardo Reyes

Ethnomusicology, UC Berkeley

Everardo “Ever” Reyes (Rarámuri descent and Chicanx) is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the intersections between music, social movements, and Indigenous self-determination. His dissertation focuses on the contemporary sonic and political influences of the 1969 Occupation of Alcatraz Island by the Indians of All Tribes on Indigenous social movements. Ever also works on Rarámuri and Nahuatl language revitalization through music technology and songwriting with the Indigenous Poetics Lab at the Arts Research...

juleon robinson

Geography, UC Berkeley

juleon robinson is an organizer, community educator, and PhD Student in the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. His research analyzes the relationship between race and property in Bay Area housing geographies, with a specific focus on the persistence of Black housing geographies as sites of temporariness and dispossession. His current project examines the 2017 demolition of the Las Deltas public housing complex in North Richmond, California, to reckon with the role of public housing policy in the ongoing fragmentation of Black geographies in California’s East Bay....

Ángel Mendiola Ross

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Ángel Mendiola Ross (they/he) is a PhD candidate in sociology at UC Berkeley who conducts research at the intersection of (sub)urban sociology, race and inequality, policing, incarceration and housing. Their current project examines the relationship between prison proliferation and ethnoracial residential segregation in metropolitan U.S. during the post-civil rights period. His empirical work on racial and renter threat in California suburbs was recently published in Social Problems. Ángel’s work has received generous support from the Berkeley...