Faculty Research Awards
Faculty research awards provide flexible funds of up to $30,000 to support and advance faculty research projects.
IRLE supports rigorous interdisciplinary research projects on topics aligned with our mission: to understand the dynamics and policies affecting workers, working life, and employment. To advance scholarship in these topics, we invite requests for funding applications from UC Berkeley faculty. The 2025-26 awards cycle applications open on March 19, 2025. Applications close April 11, 2025 by 6pm PDT. Awardees will be notified by May 9, 2025.
IRLE seeks to fund a broad and interdisciplinary range of research areas that intersect with our mission. In recent years, we have funded projects focused on education, public employment, criminal justice, labor markets, racial equity, gender discrimination, and immigration.
Faculty research awards provide flexible funds designed to support and advance faculty research projects. Awards requested can be up to $30,000.
In addition to funding, IRLE will provide grantees with collaborative meeting space, opportunities for publication and promotion of work products, and other research support appropriate to the project.
Questions? Refer to our FAQs or contact us at irle@berkeley.edu.
Awards Program Details
Funds must be spent by May 30th, 2026.
- Salary and/or fee remissions for graduate student researcher(s) (GSR).
- Hourly wages for undergraduate project student assistant(s).
- Reimbursement for purchasing of data, translation, transcription, etc.
- Light refreshments, speaker honoraria, etc., for meetings, working groups, or research convenings.
- Travel.
- Other research related expenses that are clearly outlined in the application.
- Applicants must be in residence at UC Berkeley and not on leave during the grant period (remote work is permitted).
- Both ladder-rank and adjunct faculty are eligible. Junior faculty members are encouraged to apply.
- Applications from non-senate faculty members will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
- Awardees are strongly encouraged to publish early versions of the work in IRLE’s working paper series. We also strongly encourage awardees to produce public-facing products such as issue briefs, op-eds, white papers, or legislative testimony related to the project. IRLE offers resources that can be helpful in producing these.
- When IRLE supported work results in academic publications, we ask awardees to inform IRLE of those publications.
- We also encourage GSRs working on funded projects to submit their own relevant work to our working paper or policy brief series.
Applications open on March 19, 2025. Applicants must complete the application form by Friday, April 12, 2024 and upload the following:
- A short description (1000 words or less) of your research question, methodological approach, and how IRLE funding will be used to advance the project.
- Short budget that specifies how the funds will be spent.
You are free to use your own budget format, but if helpful, a is provided.
- Complete proposals must be submitted by Friday, April 11, 2025 at 6pm PDT.
- Awardees will be notified by May 9, 2025.
- Can co-PIs submit a joint application for their project?
- Yes. Please list all applicants on the form in the additional notes section. Each selected application will receive up to $30,000.
- Are co-PIs allowed to submit 2 separate applications to receive twice the amount of funding for the same project?
- While it is possible to submit two separate applications, please note that it’s unlikely both with be funded simultaneously. If you choose to do so, we suggest including additional context explaining why you believe your project warrants consideration for double funding.
- Should my budget include Indirect Costs (IDC)?
- No. No need to include anything related to IDC rates.
- Do you need to include a Works Cited or a list of references?
- Works Cited or list of references are not required but are always welcome. If included, it does not count toward your word count.
Current and Past Awardees
Sanchita Saxena
Haas School of Business
project: Are female garment workers safe? Evidence from the Dindigul Agreement to End Gender-Based Violence and Harassment in India
Dr. Sanchita Banerjee Saxena holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles and has close to 20 years of experience working on issues related to labor rights in global supply chains, with a special focus on the garment industry in Asia. She is currently a Senior Advisor to Article One, a specialized strategy and management consultancy with expertise in human rights, responsible innovation, and sustainability. Dr. Saxena is also a professional faculty member at the Haas School of Business, the Energy and Resources Group, and the Legal Studies department at UC Berkeley where she teaches classes about business, labor and global supply chains.
Mathijs De Vaan
Haas School of Business
project: Toxic Organizations
Mathijs De Vaan is an Associate Professor at the Haas School of Business. He earned his PhD from the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. His expertise and research interests include network analysis, health care management, economic sociology, and research design and methods.
Caitlin Patler
Goldman School of Public Policy
project: Sanctuary immigration policies and infant health
Caitlin Patler is Associate Professor of Public Policy at the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy, and a faculty affiliate of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI). Dr. Patler is a sociologist whose research examines US immigration and criminal laws, legal statuses, and law enforcement institutions as drivers of socioeconomic and health disparities. Dr. Patler also studies the spillover and intergenerational consequences of systemic inequality for children and household wellbeing. Dr. Patler has received multiple grants and awards for her research on undocumented immigrant young adults, the impacts of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and the US immigration prison system. She serves on the Editorial Board of Social Problems.
Joseph Shapiro
Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics
project: Climate Change Policy and Labor Market Inequality
Joseph Shapiro is an Associate Professor in the Agricultural & Resource Economics Department and the Economics Department at UC Berkeley. He is a Faculty Affiliate at the Energy Institute at Haas, serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Political Economy, Co-Editor of the Journal of Public Economics, and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research agenda focuses on three general questions: (1) How do international trade policy and environmental policy interact? (2) What are the costs, benefits, and incidence of water pollution and other environmental policy? (3) How important are the investments that people make to protect themselves against air pollution and climate change?
Heather Haveman
Department of Sociology
project: Obstacles to Gender Equality in Tech: Gendered Perceptions
Heather Haveman is a Professor of Sociology and Business at the University of California, Berkeley. She holds a B.A. in history (1982, University of Toronto), an M.B.A. (1985, University of Toronto), and a Ph.D. in organizational behavior and industrial relations (1990, University of California, Berkeley). She studies how organizations, the fields in which they are embedded, and the careers of their members and employees evolve. She investigates questions that relate to organizational stability and change: How do new kinds of organizations emerge and how do new industries develop? How strong are the forces that impel or inhibit change in existing organizations’ structures, strategies, and actions? What are the consequences of organizational change for organizations themselves and for their employees? How does industry evolution affect social structures? Her current work involves American tech firms, U.S. collegiate women’s sports, state-legal cannabis retailers in several U.S. states, and Chinese-listed firms. Heather’s published work has used a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods. She is currently harnessing natural-language-processing methods to review academic literatures and trace the rise and fall of different theories, and to map corporate cultures and workplace practices.
Hidetaka Hirota
Department of History
project: The American Dilemma: Foreign Labor, Nativism, and the Making of U.S. Immigration Policy
Hidetaka Hirota is an associate professor in the Department of History. He is a social and legal historian of the United States specializing in immigration. His major areas of research are the nineteenth-century United States; American immigration law and policy; the U.S. and the World; and transnational history. He is particularly interested in the history of American nativism and immigration control. His published works have examined the origins and early developments of U.S. immigration policy from the antebellum period to the Progressive Era. Adopting a social and legal history approach, his scholarship pays equal attention to the legal dimension of immigration control and the practical implementation of immigration laws on the ground.
David Harding
Department of Sociology
project: Institutions and Educational Inequality: A Cross-National Study
David Harding studies poverty and inequality, urban neighborhoods, education, adolescents and young adults, incarceration, and prisoner reentry. He uses both qualitative and quantitative methods. His current projects include the social and economic reintegration of former prisoners, the transition to adulthood after prison, the effects of incarceration on crime, employment, and health, and causal inference for contextual effects research.
Federico Castillo
Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management
project: The UC-Mexico Farm Labor Research Cluster
Federico Castillo is an Environmental/Agricultural Economist with a PhD and undergraduate degrees from the University of California, Berkeley. Federico’s research is centered on technology transfer and innovation, economic valuation, the socio economic impacts of climate change, the economic aspects of protected areas and migration. He is a member of a multidisciplinary team that is developing a research agenda on climate change, agriculture and population issues in the Berkeley Campus. He is currently engaged in research with scholars from The Tropical Agricultural Research Center (CATIE), the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), The Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) and the University of California, Davis in projects dealing with ecosystem based adaptation to climate change, the socio economic impact of weather extremes in California agriculture and climate change impacts on migration from Mexico to the US. Federico has taught courses related to migration to the United States, natural resource economics, economics of climate change and sustainable business practices.
Harpreet Mangat
College of Computing, Data Science, and Society
project: Computational Research for Equity in Legal Systems (CREL)
Dr. Harpreet Mangat is Executive Director of Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI) at the University of California, Berkeley. She has held various leadership positions on campus at the Goldman School of Public Policy, the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, and the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues. She was also a Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholar at Cal. Prior to coming to the United States, Harpreet was a professor in the department of Political Science at Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar, Punjab. In India, she conducted research on the Indo-Pakistan border, diaspora nationalism and gender.
Abhay Aneja
Law
project: The Impact of Civil Service Protections on Federal Government Personnel and Performance: Evidence from the United States Post Office
Andrew Baker
Law
project: Hedge Fund Activism and Labor Market Outcomes
Irene Bloemraad
Sociology
project: Interdisciplinary Immigration Workshop
Michael Burawoy
Sociology
project: The Significance of the Labor Process for the 2022 Graduate Student Strike at the University of California
Ellen Eisen
Environmental Health Sciences, Public Health
project: How much death due to heart disease could be prevented among US miners if the permissible exposure limit (PEL) for respirable diesel exhaust in mines was lowered?
Cecile Gaubert
Economics
project: Mapping Out Mobility: The Interregional Labor Supply Elasticity and its Determinants
Jovan Lewis
Geography
project: Reparations and the Racial Wealth Gap in California
Dara O’Rourke
Environmental Science, Policy, and Management
project: Evaluating the Impacts of Sustainability Transitions on Workers and Communities
Aruna Rangananathan
Business
project: Speak Up or Stay Silent: Impact of Remote Work on Worker Voice
Danny Yagan
Economics
project: Made in America Policies: Theory and Evidence
Abhay Aneja
Law
project: The Roots of Racial Integration in the Federal Government Workforce: Evidence from the Postal Service
Sarah Anzia
Public Policy and Political Science
project: Early City Employee Organizations and the Development of Labor-Management Relations in the Public Sector
Irene Bloemraad
Sociology
project: Interdisciplinary Immigration Workshop
Sydnee Caldwell
Business
project: Bargaining, Outside Options, and the Gender Wage Gap
Supreet Kaur
Economics
project: The Educational and Labor Market Impacts of Drug Use
Shelley Liu
Public Policy
project: How Gender and Migrant Status Affect Collective Action Among Street Vendors
Claire Montialoux
Public Policy
project: Work Sharing and Gender Inequality
Jesse Rothstein
Public Policy
project: Incidence of the EITC Across Firms
Chunyan Yang
Education
project: A Mixed-Method Study about California Teachers’ Job Demands, Resources, and Wellbeing as Universal Pre-Kindergarten Early Implementers
Abhay Aneja
Law
project: The Impact of Government Discrimination on Long-Run Racial Differences in Wealth and Mobility
Guo Xu
Business
project: The Impact of Government Discrimination on Long-Run Racial Differences in Wealth and Mobility
Irene Bloemraad
Sociology
project: Interdisciplinary Immigration Workshop
Tolani Britton
Education
project: An Exploration of the Relationship Between Virtual Academic Advising and Student Outcomes
Neil Fligstein
Sociology
project: Occupational Polarization and Mobility Patterns from 1968 to Present
Benjamin Handel
Economics
project: The Impact of Medical Provider Fatigue on Performance and Outcomes
David Harding
Sociology
project: Criminal Records, Narratives, and Destigmatization
Heather Haveman
Sociology & Business
project: Obstacles to Gender Equality at Work
Danya Lagos
Sociology
project: Employment Trajectories of Transgender Workers
Elizabeth Linos
Public Policy
project: Increasing Civilian Engagement with Police Accountability Processes
Christopher Muller
Sociology
project: Agricultural Mechanization and Mass Incarceration
Christian Paiz
Ethnic Studies
project: Transcription of UFW Movement Oral Histories
Trond Peterson
Business & Sociology
project: The Motherhood Problem
Travis Bristol
Education
project: An Exploration of a Professional Learning Community for Novice Male Teachers of Color
Sydnee Caldwell
Business & Economics
project: Examining the effects of automation on the labor market and on individuals’ political beliefs.
Ellora Derenoncourt
Economics & Public Policy
project: Regenerating Opportunity: Black Suburbanization in the South, 1970-2020
Supreet Kaur
Economics
project: High worker turnover and absenteeism: the role of labor supply
Erin Kerrison
Social Welfare
project: Tricycles and Trapdoors: A Mixed-Method Study of Overt and Covert Exclusionary Discipline in Preschools
Jonathan Kolstad
Business and Economics
project: Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and the process of diagnosis and documentation in medicine.
Claire Montialoux
Public Policy
project: Racial disparities in Brazil
G. Cristina Mora
Sociology and Chicano/Latino Studies
project: The Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on California’s ‘Barely Making It’
Tianna Paschel
Sociology and African American Studies
project: The Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on California’s ‘Barely Making It’
Ricardo Perez-Truglia
Business
project: The Old Boys’ Club: Schmoozing and the Gender Gap
Benjamin Schoefer
Economics
project: Short-Time Work and Unemployment Benefits During COVID-19 / Labor Demand Effects of Financing Constraints and Wage Rigidity
Sameer Srivastava
Business
project: What role does the mobility of organizational leaders play in shaping corporate culture?
Guo Xu
Business and Public Policy
project: The Economic Costs of Employment Segregation: Evidence from the US Federal Government
Conrad Miller
Business
project: Why Are Larger Employers More Racially Diverse?
Elizabeth Linos
Public Policy
project: Reducing Case Worker Burnout to Improve Job Seeker Outcomes: A Field Experiment
Avi Feller
Public Policy
project: Understanding mechanisms driving long-run impacts of 1990s reforms to the safety net
Danny Yagan
Economics
project: The Rise of Pass-Throughs and the Decline in the Labor Share
Neil Fligstein
Sociology
project: Tracking the Impact of Domestic Outsourcing on Employment Outcomes in the United States, 1992 to 2017
Irene Bloemraad
Sociology
project: Interdisciplinary Immigration Workshop
Avi Feller
Public Policy
project: Practical Tools for Panel Data Models
David Harding
Sociology
project: Underground Scholars Policy Team
Erin Kerrison
Social Welfare
project: Understanding “Us vs Them” Attitudes, Police Officer Wellness, and Public Safety
Elizabeth Linos
Public Policy
project: Burnout and Bias in Decision-making
Christopher Muller
Sociology
project: Land and Racial Economic Inequality
Daniel Schneider
Sociology
project: The Effects of New York City’s Fair Scheduling Law on Job Quality
Sandra Smith
Sociology
project: Perceptions and Experiences of the Formerly Incarcerated with Fair Chance Employment Initiatives
Kim Voss
Sociology
project: Golden Futures and Hard Realities: Polarized Lives in the Bay Area
Irene Bloemraad
Sociology
project: Golden Futures and Hard Realities: Polarized Lives in the Bay Area
Richard Walker
Geography
project: California Studies Seminar
Danny Yagan
Economics
project: Pareto-Improving Growth and Place-Based Redistribution
Catherine Albiston
Sociology, Law
project: Inequality in Evaluation
Irene Bloemraad
Sociology
project: Interdisciplinary Immigration Workshop
Avi Feller
Public Policy
project: Improving the Synthetic Control Method
Cybelle Fox
Sociology
David Harding
Sociology
project: Probing the Limits of Criminal Record Stigma: Audit Studies of the Job Market for College Graduates
Supreet Kaur
Economics
project: Land and Racial Economic Inequality
Elizabeth Linos
Public Policy
project: Reducing burnout in front line workers
Aprajit Mahajan
ARE
project: Frictions in India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and Household Borrowing
Conrad Miller
Business
project: Local Variation in Criminal Justice Disparities by Race and Class
Christian Paiz
Sociology
project: Oral Histories of United Farm Worker Rank-and-File
Benjamin Schoefer
Economics
project: The Aggregate Labor Supply Curve at the Extension Margin: A Reservation Wage Approach
Sandra Smith
Sociology
project: Perceptions and Experiences of the Formerly Incarcerated with Fair Chance Employment Initiatives
Richard Walker
Geography
project: California Studies Lecture and Dinner Series
Danny Yagan
Economics
project: Pareto-Improving Growth and Place-Based Redistribution
Irene Bloemraad
Sociology
project: Interdisciplinary Immigration Workshop
Cybelle Fox
Sociology
project: Interdisciplinary Immigration Workshop
Cristina Mora
Sociology
project: Interdisciplinary Immigration Workshop
Yu-Ling Chang
Social Welfare
project: Multiple Income Support Program Participation and Long-Term Employment and Earnings Trajectories Among Single-Mother Families
Ruth Berins Collier
Political Science
project: On-Demand Work in the Platform Economy: Grassroots, Surrogates, and the Politics of Uber Regulation
Neil Fligstein
Sociology
project: US Labor Militancy and Firm Financialization From 1984 – 2004
Anu Gomez
Social Welfare
project: Racial and Ethnic Differences in Pregnancy Acceptability: Understanding the Roles of State-Level Employment Disparities
David Harding
Sociology
project: Mediation of Neighborhood Effects on Educational Outcomes
Seth Holmes
Public Health
project: Training for Unequal Care: Medical Students, Social Inequality and the Future of Health Labor
Hilary Hoynes
Economics, GSPP
project: Effects of WIC on Food Consumption and Nutrients for Children: Evidence From Regression Discontinuity at Age 5
Ming Leung
Haas
project: Is It the Picture or the Thousand Words? How Photos and Messaging Language of Women and Minority Job Applicants Affect Their Hiring Outcomes in a Technology-Mediated Labor Market
Aprajit Mahajan
ARE
project: Welfare Effects of Wage Payment Delays: Frictions in India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme
Daniel Schneider
Sociology
project: Schedule Instability and Unpredictability and Worker and Family Wellbeing
Richard Walker
Geography
project: California Studies Lecture and Dinner Series
Sarah Aniza
Public Policy
project: The Politics of Public Safety: How Unions of Police Officers and Firefighters Shape Local Public Service Provision
Clair Brown
Economics
project: Measuring California’s Quality of Life, and Job Quality
Ruth Berins Collier
Political Science
project: Regulation of On-Demand Work: The Politics of the Uber Economy
Mathijs De Vaan
Haas
project: Collaboration After Retractions?
William H. Dow
Public Health
project: Participation and Plan Choices in the 2014-2016 California Individual Health Insurance Market
Neil Fligstein
Sociology
project: The Role of Foreclosures in the Destruction of Wealth for Black, Hispanic, and Middle Class Families in the Great Recession
Cybelle Fox
Sociology
project: Interdisciplinary Immigration Workshop
Alexander Gelber
GSPP
project: The Effect of the Social Security Earnings Test on Employment
Heather Haveman
Sociology
project: The New One Percent? Data Science and Changes in American Corporate Leadership
Seth Holmes
Public Health
project: Growing Up Transborder: Youth, Future Aspirations, and Immigrant Farm Labor in the United States
Soloman Hsiang
Public Policy
project: Labor Productivity in a Warmer World: The Impact of Climate Change on the Global Workforce
Patrick Kline
Economics
project: How Much Did the Wage Structure Change? Correlated Estimates of Worker-Firm Effects and Sorting
Ming Leung
Haas
project: The Dilemma of Mobility: The Differential Effects of Women and Men’s Erratic Career Paths on Performance Appraisals
David Levine
Haas
project: “Personalized Policy” for OSHA (& Beyond): Machine Learning of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Without Over-Fitting
Jeremy Magruder
ARE
project: Search Frictions and Statistical Discrimination: A Field Experiment with a Large Indian Web Portal
Jeff Perloff
ARE
project: Labor Supply and the Incidence of Taxes Fall on New York Taxi Drivers
Daniel Schneider
Sociology
project: Economic Uncertainty, Precarity, and Family Formation
Benjamin Schoefer
Economics
project: (1) Prices and Labor Costs: New Evidence from a Location and Industry Specific Producer Price Index; (2) The Role of Quits and Replacement Hiring in the Cyclicality of Job Openings
Sameer B. Srivastava
Haas
project: (1) Comparing and Contrasting Survey- and Language-Based Measures of Cultural Fit; (2) The Effect of Social Belonging on Social Network Positions and Attainment in the Workplace
Kim Voss
Sociology
project: Labor’s Changing Strategies and Democratic Dilemmas
Reed Walker
Haas
project: The Big Pull: Company Towns and Manufacturing Deagglomeration
Richard Walker
Geography
project: California Studies Lecture & Dinner Series
Danny Yagan
Economics
project: The 2007-2009 Recession and the Rise of Trump