Grad Student - ISSI

Larissa Benjamin

Public Health, UC Berkeley

Larissa Benjamin is a Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) candidate at UC Berkeley in the School of Public Health. Her research examines the structural and historical factors that contribute to cardiovascular disease risk in Southeastern rural communities, employing rigorous quantitative and qualitative research methods. Using geospatial and statistical methods, she maps patterns of neighborhood-level disinvestment and segregation by rurality across 14 states in the Southeastern US and investigates associations between disinvestment and cardiovascular disease risk factors and...

Isabella Brown

Education, UC Berkeley

Isabella C. Brown is a PhD candidate in the Joint Doctoral Program in Special Education. Her research focuses on systemic barriers impeding agency in decision-making spaces for Black parents navigating the special education system. Her work builds upon a desire to inform policy and disrupt the understudied phenomenon of inequitable special education milieus to yield truly collaborative parent-school partnerships for the most marginalized. She believes ethnographic research is critical to the contextualization of how Black and Brown parents traverse the undercurrent of special education...

Jacqueline Brown

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Jacqueline Brown (she/her) is a PhD student in the Sociology department at University of California, Berkeley. She is a mixed-methodologist who is interested in access to higher education, organizational change, and socioeconomic mobility. Her research primarily uses quantitative, computational, and interview methods. She is currently working on a longitudinal analysis of college admissions policies related to income and class background and a study of invisible pedagogies among teachers in New York City. Additionally, she is a graduate student researcher on a project that evaluates a data...

Christian Caballero

Political Science, UC Berkeley

Christian Caballero is a Political Science PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on American politics and political behavior. In particular, he studies the ways in which social networks influence processes of political persuasion and democratic deliberation, as well as how political ideologies develop within subcultures. He holds a B.A. in Politics and Sociology from New York University and an M.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Joanna Cardenas

African American Studies Department, UC Berkeley

Joanna Cardenas is a doctoral student in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. Prior to graduate school, she received a dual B.A. in African American Studies and Legal Studies with honors from Cal. Her research interests are situated at the nexus of critical carceral studies, Disability Studies, and Black Feminist Thought, with an emphasis on the intersection of race, class, and gender. Through a close analysis of contemporary California prisons, Joanna’s work broadly focuses on how systems of confinement inform our understandings around gender,...

Juan Carlos Bordes

School of Public Health, UC Berkeley

Born in Ecuador, Juan Carlos Bordes has had a lengthy journey to become a doctoral candidate in Public Health at UC Berkeley. At age 16, he and his family immigrated from Ecuador to the US to start anew. This change included a new culture, language, and more. Although challenging, these experiences began a process of building resiliency in him.

Juan Carlos used resiliency to become the first in his family to obtain undergraduate and graduate education. Additionally, working in healthcare for the past ten years ignited his passion for creating inclusive workplace environments...

Dori-Taylor Carter

Sociology, UC Berkeley

Dori-Taylor Carter (she/her/hers) is a sociology PhD student, Chancellor's Fellow, and NSF Graduate Research Fellow. She is interested in the construction of identity categories and populations, the political representation of identity groups, and the mobilization of shared identities and experiences toward collective liberation. Her previous work has examined how Asian American and Filipinx American community organizers mobilized the 2020 census in Chicago, and her master's project examines how political action committees construct identity representation in U.S. politics.

Ataya Cesspooch

Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, UC Berkeley

Lauren Chambers

School of Information, UC Berkeley

Lauren Chambers is a Ph.D. student at the UC Berkeley School of Information. Advised by technology law expert Prof. Deirdre Mulligan, she studies the intersection of data, technology, and sociopolitical advocacy. Her primary project is a mixed-methods qualitative study exploring the roles of 'public interest technologists' within civil society and advocacy organizations, as they are shaping policy, informing legal arguments, and transforming political campaigns.

Previously Lauren was the staff technologist at the ACLU of Massachusetts, where she explored government data in order to...

Tak-Huen Chau

Political Science, UC Berkeley

Tak-Huen Chau is a PhD candidate in political science and MA candidate in economics. He is interested in social identities and political behavior in general. Currently, he is working on projects that utilize formal theory and surveys to explain dominant group attitudes on national identity, assimilation, and bilingual education.