Grad Student - ISSI

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,...

Vo Ram Yoon

Education, UC Berkeley

Vo Ram Yoon (him/his) is a doctoral student in the Policy, Politics, and Leadership cluster at the Berkeley School of Education (BSE). Ethnically Korean and raised in Bolivia, his passion for advancing social justice and equity in education have been shaped by his international upbringing and witnessing how privilege and marginalization manifest in education from the classrooms of Chicago Public Schools to the private English academies in Tokyo. His research interests include the racialization of AAPI students and the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in organizations.

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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.

Alexis Atsilvsgi Zaragoza

Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley

Alexis Atsilvsgi is a Cherokee and Chicana Master of Public Policy student at the Goldman School. She previously served on the California Community College’s Board of Governors and the University of California Board of Regents. Alexis works at the intersection of higher education, supply chain/logistics infrastructure, legal geographies, surveillance policy, and geopoetics to understand geographies of hope in capitalist-entrenched rural landscapes, as well as spatial-driven governance structures. Her past projects include hope-mapping carceral, logistics, and education pathways in rural...

Michelle Zaragoza

Social Welfare, UC Berkeley

Michelle Zaragoza, MSW, LCSW (She/Ella) is a doctoral student in the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. Drawing from her experiences as a daughter of immigrants and professional work as a community-based mental health therapist in Los Angeles, Michelle’s scholarship explores the impact of contemporary anti-immigrant policy environments on Latine well-being and how social work can help mitigate and resist these conditions. Currently, she serves as a research assistant with the Center on Immigration and Child Welfare Initiative (CICW), where she focuses on...

Michelle Zaragoza

Social Welfare, UC Berkeley

Michelle Zaragoza (MSW, LCSW) is a Chancellor’s Fellow and Ph.D. Student in Social Welfare at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on using qualitative methodologies, including arts-based research, to explore the lived experiences of mental health and trauma among Latinx communities. Her work investigates the wide-ranging mental health disparities that impact Latinx immigrant communities. Drawing on her clinical experience as a mental health therapist, Michelle is dedicated to informing culturally relevant and trauma-informed social work practices and Behavioral Health policies.

Anna Zaret

Jurisprudence and Social Policy, UC Berkeley

Anna Zaret is a Ph.D. Candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy. She has research interests in medical and scientific evidence, criminal procedure, and tort law, where she combines her expertise in political economy and political theory to approach contemporary problems related to police violence, health policy, and social inequality. She was previously a fellow at the UCSF – UC Law Consortium on Law, Science, and Health Policy and clerked for the Hon. Laurel Beeler in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California and. She received her J.D. magna cum laude...

Tianyue Zhang

Asian Studies, UC Berkeley

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...