Congratulations to Our 2024-2025 Research Awardees!

Kassandra Hernandez is a Ph.D. Candidate in Economics at UC Berkeley. She studies how public policy exacerbates or mitigates inequality, particularly for low-wage workers and immigrants. Her work examines worker-led enforcement mechanisms, specifically labor code violations, lawsuits, and subsequent impacts on workers and firms. Other work studies the expansion of financial aid for undocumented students and the extent to which that improved access to economic mobility.

She is a proud Californian, daughter of Mexican immigrants in agriculture and domestic work, and first-generation college student. She holds an M.P.P. and a B.A. in Philosophy (Labor Studies minor), both from UCLA.

Ja’Nya is a fourth year PhD student in the Education Policy, Politics and Leadership cluster. She started her career as a special education teacher but transitioned into training for educators on race and identity and eventually a policy researcher. She studies the way ethno-racially marginalized stakeholders develop socio-cultural ties to advocate for local schools. She focuses on parents, students and teachers, and how they navigate school closures by using community centered practices.

Gaby Lohner is a fourth-year PhD Student in Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy. Her research interests center around poverty and policy analysis, specifically how education and social welfare policy affect low-income families. Her current work focuses on how education policy and student support impact student success in both K-12 and higher education, and ways to improve access to higher education. She holds a Master’s degree from the Barcelona School of Economics and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Georgia.

Yuen is working at the intersection of development, labor, and behavioral economics. She conducts field experiments in real-world settings to study the economic consequences of human psychology, with a focus on low-income and marginalized communities. She is currently conducting field experiments in partnership with a large garment manufacturing firm in Tanzania to study how the status quo system of largely subjective, discretionary decision-making compares to a more data-driven approach. Other work has focused on the role of attention in perpetuating self-censorship and misperceptions on U.S. college campuses and an interdisciplinary synthesis of the evidence on the psychology of poverty.

Teresita is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at UC Berkeley. Her research lies at the intersection of labor economics and inequality––with a focus on immigrant communities in the U.S. Teresita and her family’s experience as Mexican immigrants influenced her decision to pursue graduate school and continues to inform her research interests. Her current work studies whether government policies and school programs promote educational access, or affect the postsecondary and labor market outcomes of undocumented students in California and English learners in Texas.

Justine Weng is a Ph.D. student in Economics at UC Berkeley. Her research interests are in the economics of education, with a focus on improving educational opportunities for students. This project aims to examine how districts moving to four-day school weeks in Texas affects students and teachers. Prior to graduate studies, she was a high school math teacher in the Bay Area.

Seung Yong Sung is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley. He conducts applied microeconomics research at the intersection of labor, development and education economics. His projects explores labor market discriminations and effects of different de-biasing methods (such as blind hiring) on labor market outcomes and educational investment choices.

Farnam is a PhD student at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, and a researcher in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco. Having previously earned MD and MPH degrees, Farnam’s research investigates the intersection of professionals and emerging technologies, drawing from medical sociology, organizational theory, science and technology studies, and inequality studies. Farnam is particularly interested in the evolving relationship between physicians and artificial intelligence, the dynamics surrounding physician influencers, and the social construction of medical AI science. Farnam is a full-cycle researcher dedicated to deeply understanding organizational practices through qualitative methods and refining these insights with quantitative methods, essential for generating knowledge that drives meaningful change.

Vera Parra is a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley, interested in labor history, political economy, and organizing in the 21st century. With support from IRLE she will be researching the recent history of auto industry organizing drives, both in the US and Mexico. She is interested in examining how green industrial policy– in particular the transition to EVs and attempts to secure a North American supply chain– shape organizing conditions on both sides of the border. Before graduate school, Vera spent a decade organizing with immigrant worker organizations.

Kai is a Ph.D. candidate in City and Regional Planning with research interests at the intersection of traffic safety, climate health, and labor equity. His dissertation investigates the combined impacts of the gig economy and climate change on occupational health and safety. Utilizing technologies like wearable sensors, UAV-assisted traffic videography, and AI-enabled image recognition, Kai’s research examines how algorithmic management and ambient heat influence risky driving behaviors among on-demand food delivery workers in Taiwan. Prior to doctoral studies, he completed a MSc in Transport from Imperial College London, and a BS in Urban Planning from National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan.

Richard’s research lies at the intersection of labor economics and urban economics, with a focus on local labor markets in the US. In his dissertation, he analyzes how the citywide presence of college alumni networks impacts geographic mobility. Specifically, he examines whether college-educated workers are more likely to remain in and move to cities that feature a higher concentration of alumni from their respective alma maters. Additionally, he assesses how these local college alumni networks facilitate upward mobility on the job ladder.

Laura is a PhD Candidate in City and Regional Planning. Her dissertation explores the political economy of warehouse development across California, focusing on two regional case studies: the Inland Empire and North San Joaquin Valley. At the local level, Laura’s analysis focuses on land use politics in several cities where there is a concentration of warehouses. At the regional level, her analysis focuses on the role of e-commerce in contributing to intra- and inter-regional inequality. Laura received a Bachelor of Planning (Honors Class 1) and Master of Philosophy (Planning and Urban Development), both from UNSW, Australia.

Morgan is a PhD candidate in the Business and Public Policy program at the Haas School of Business. Morgan is interested in labor and public economics with a particular focus on issues related to public-sector organization such as collective bargaining and civil service protections. For example, his research studies which workers continue to join labor unions and the effects of declining unionization on local public schools. Morgan graduated from UW-Madison with degrees in economics and journalism.

Raheem Chaudhry is a PhD candidate at the Goldman School of Public Policy. His research focuses on how public policy can increase access to opportunity for individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds, with recent work focusing on public housing, voting rights, and land-use regulations. Previously, he was a Research Associate at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, where he researched federal safety net programs and poverty.

Kelly Quinn is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation investigates the changing nature of the employment relationship under shareholder value capitalism and its implications for workers’ long-term economic security. Motivated by a shift in the balance of power between workers and firms since the late 1970s, her project studies: 1) how contracting has impacted benefit provision within occupations; 2) the extent to which government workers in heavily outsourced occupations have been buffered; and 3) differences between public and private sector unions in their ability to secure quality retirement savings plans.

Elif Tasar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley. Her research interests are in labor, urban, and public economics, with a focus on the relationship between lifecycle transitions and labor market outcomes in the US. Elif’s studies at Berkeley have been supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Previously, she studied at the London School of Economics, where she was a Fulbright Fellow, and at Stanford University.

Joaquin is a PhD candidate in the Economics department at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on the impact of public policies on family well-being in Latin America, with a particular emphasis on education. With his research, he aims to understand how these policies affect students’ success in school and their future career paths, and ultimately contribute with evidence to shaping more effective public policy. In his Job Market Paper, Joaquin studies the effects of housing assistance on educational outcomes for children, and labor market outcomes for adults, with a focus on the geographical component of the policy.

Leïla Njee Bugha is a 6th year PhD candidate in the Agriculture and Resources Economics department. As a PhD student, she specializes in development economics, labor economics, with a focus on understanding the barriers to women’s employment in Sub-Saharan Africa. My current work focuses on transportation barriers for urban workers in large cities in Nigeria and Ghana.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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.