Grad Student - ISSI

Julio Salas

Sociology, UC Berkeley

A second-generation Mexican and Colombian immigrant born and raised in Corona, Queens, New York City (NYC), Julio Salas is a Chancellor’s Fellow and Sociology PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. Centering immigrant families, his research interests and projects lie at the nexus of immigration, emotion, race & ethnicity, social stratification, and health. His current interview-based research project explores how Latinx immigrant families experience(d) grief during and after the COVID-19 pandemic in NYC and how macro-level and meso-level forces shaped said experiences...

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.

Henry Sales

School of Education, UC Berkeley

Henry Leonel Sales Hernández is an Indigenous Maya Mam educator, researcher, and doctoral student in the School of Education at UC Berkeley. Born and raised in San Juan Atitán, Guatemala, and currently living in Oakland, California, his work is rooted in language justice, cultural affirmation, and educational equity. His research and work focuses on the revitalization of the Mam language through early childhood education, storytelling, and community-based practices. Drawing on ethnographic methods, Henry studies how Mam toddlers, youth, and their families in Oakland engage with books and...

Miguel Samano

English, UC Berkeley

Miguel Samano is a Ph.D. candidate in English with research interests in Relational Ethnic Studies, Chicanx and Latinx studies, Asian American Studies, Social Science History, and Sociocultural Linguistics. Their dissertation, "Talk's Stories: Sociocultural Linguistics and Latinx and Asian American Narrative Forms," historicizes post-1965 Latinx and Asian American literary narrative's interest in the formal patterning of stranger-to-stranger talk over and against that of sociocultural linguistics, an interdisciplinary formation in the social sciences. They previously co-coordinated the...

Jasmine M. Sanders

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Jasmine M. Sanders is a Sociology PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research centers issues of equity and access with a focus on organizational inequality, culture, and workplace policies and practices. Her dissertation research examines the role of extracurricular work activities, like happy hours and holiday parties, in career advancement. Jasmine has contributed to research exploring organizational policies and practices that promote equality in college sports, belonging in the workplace, and gendered conceptions of work-life balance in tech...

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...

Jaclyn Schess

Health Policy and Management, School of Public Health, UC Berkeley

Jaclyn Schess is a PhD student in Health Policy/Health Economics at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. She is also pursuing the Designated Emphasis in Political Economy through the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative. Her research investigates the social, political, and economic determinants of mental ill-health and addiction utilizing causal inference tools. Her work covers themes across health, development, labor and political economics. In addition, Jaclyn is the CEO and Founder at Generation Mental Health.

Prami Sengupta

Social Ecology, UC Irvine

Natasha Shannon

Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, UC Berkeley

Zoe Silverman

Education, UC Berkeley