Grad Student - ISSI

Sharon Muthoni Wachira is an MDevEng candidate at UC Berkeley and NSF Development Technologies to Development (DToD) Fellow with expertise in energy systems, geospatial analysis, and environmental research. Her research focuses on sustainable energy access and climate resilience in East Africa, with a current project examining clean cooking solutions for refugee communities in Rwanda. Prior to Berkeley, she worked as a geothermal engineer at KenGen, Kenya’s national power utility, founded PM Digital, and Chanuka, a Project for Peace awardee. She serves as a Graduate Student...

Carlotta Wright de la Cal is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research lies at the intersection of Indigenous history, labor control, and immigration policy in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Her dissertation project examines how railroad corporations reshaped mobility, labor systems, and racialized border control across the region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project centers transborder Indigenous communities—particularly Yaqui and Mayo—who incorporated railroad work into community-building and resistance...

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....