Luciné Jamkochian is the Communications Coordinator at ISSI. She earned a BA in English from UC Berkeley and began her career in communications at the Cal Alumni Association. She has experience in both the agency and nonprofit sectors, including at a public relations firm focused on environmental issues and at San Francisco CASA. She loves books, coffee, and exploring the Bay.
Deborah Freedman Lustig is a cultural anthropologist whose research has focused on gender and education in the United States and Kenya, where she was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in 2004-5. Lustig earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan. Her articles about teenage mothers have been published in the journals Anthropology and Education Quarterly and Childhood and in the edited volume Childhood, Youth, and Social Work in Transformation: Implications for Policy and Practice (Columbia University Press...
Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern, Ph.D., is the Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI) at the University of California, Berkeley and a human geographer and food systems scholar. Her research and teaching explore the intersections among social movements, labor, migration, and food systems, with particular attention to cross-border knowledge and social justice. Minkoff-Zern’s newest book, Will Work for Food: Labor Across the Food Chain (UC Press, 2025), looks at labor across food sectors and the intersections between food-system social movements and...
Katie Owensby came to ISSI after serving as an Undergraduate Academic Advisor for the Society & Environment major in the College of Natural Resources at UC Berkeley. Prior to working in CNR, Katie worked for Cal Alumni Association as their Marketing Data and Reporting Manager. Katie earned her BA in Psychology from University of Redlands and her MA in Counseling Psychology from University of San Francisco. She has two children, a daughter in high school, and a son who is a first year in college on the east coast. She and her family recently relocated from the Bay Area to...
Maxwell Vanderwarker is ISSI’s Administrative Director. He received his BA in English from UC Berkeley, where he was involved in LGBT+ leadership with Oscar Wilde House. After graduation, he transitioned into Human Resources and finance and worked with a variety of small tech startups in the Bay Area, and at the College of Natural Resources, and previously as ISSI’s Administrative Manager. Most recently, he was the Operations Officer at the UCSF HEAL Initiative, a global health fellowship focused on providing health care to resource-denied communities both in the global south and in the...
