Graduate Research Awards

Sam Ayers is a fourth-year PhD student in Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy. His research lies at the intersection of health and education, with a focus on improving educational outcomes for K-12 students. His current research focuses on the efficacy of youth mental health care for improving student well-being and outcomes.

Marco Badilla is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at UC Berkeley. His research explores the intersection of education and labor markets, with a focus on how alternative evaluation systems shape career outcomes and skill development. His work leverages natural experiments and novel datasets to study talent misallocation, soft skills, and policy reform. He is from Costa Rica, where he completed his undergraduate studies in economics at the University of Costa Rica.

AnneMarie Bryson is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Economics Department with broad interests at the intersection of urban and labor economics. Her research focuses on the causes and consequences of inequality and the role of public policy in either alleviating or deepening these disparities. She is especially interested in the growing concentration of poverty in cities and large urban areas, as well as the effectiveness of place-based policies in addressing gentrification and income inequality. My other work centers around the effect of healthcare access for justice-involved individuals and immigrant communities.

Maribel Estrada Calderon is a Ph.D. student in History at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on labor activism in the twentieth-century American West. Her current project examines the history of one of the longest labor disputes in Las Vegas, Nevada. Centering hospitality workers’ experiences, her research explores how these individuals and their unions successfully fought to protect their workplace rights in the face of adversity. She holds a B.A. and M.A. in History from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Prior to pursuing her doctoral studies, she was a world history teacher in Nevada.

I am a PhD candidate in Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, with a background in Physical Therapy and Ergonomics from the Universidad de Concepción, Chile. My research explores how environmental stressors and extreme working conditions affect the health and safety of wildland firefighters in Chile. I focus on the physiological burden of extreme heat and air pollution during wildfire suppression. By integrating sensor-based physiological data with environmental and occupational metrics, I aim to inform more equitable and evidence-based policies to protect outdoor workers facing climate-related risks. This work bridges academic and institutional partnerships across Chile and the United States (California) to advance occupational health under a changing climate.

Steve Ramos is a Ph.D. Candidate in Economics at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on higher education policy, particularly its intersection with consumer finance and labor economics. His recent work examines the effects of student loan debt from the perspective of the understudied parent borrower population. With support from IRLE, he will investigate how relieving physicians’ and dentists’ educational debt influences their participation in the Medicaid system. He holds a B.S. in Business Economics and a B.A. in Mathematics from Miami University (Ohio).

Brenda Sciepura is a PhD Candidate in Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley and a Research Fellow with The People Lab at Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Her research lies at the intersection of behavioral science and public management, with a focus on government recruitment, retention and workforce development. At the moment, she is studying what drives early-career professionals to pursue government careers and how public agencies can enhance recruitment strategies to attract the next generation of public servants.

Dustin Swonder is a PhD candidate in the UC Berkeley economics department working at the intersection of public finance, labor economics, and financial economics. With IRLE support, he will examine how access to down payment assistance affects prospective homebuyers’ residential choices and economic outcomes. His other work studies the effects of business taxation on workers and entrepreneurs. Dustin holds an A.B. in applied mathematics from Harvard University.

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.

Raheem is a fifth year PhD student in Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. He is interested in learning about how we can increase access to opportunity for all children, particularly those from disadvantaged and historically marginalized backgrounds.

Broadly, his research examines how public policy and political institutions can work to perpetuate or attenuate economic and racial inequality, with recent focusing on voting rights, land use regulations, and low-income housing policy. This work sits at the intersection of public finance, urban economics, and political economy.

Xavier Durham is a 6th year PhD Student in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. By and large, he is interested in topics related to punishment, racial inequality, and policing with his current project focusing on the political economy of reentry in California and what that means for contemporary changes in penal and security-based practices within cities. Outside of research, he is a passionate mentor for multiple undergraduate programs at Cal and strives to become a professor of Sociology and Law. He also makes a mean banana bread.  

Richard Jin is a PhD candidate in economics at UC Berkeley. His research lies at the intersection of labor economics and urban economics. He is interested in uncovering the factors contributing to differences in worker earnings and productivity across local labor markets, with a particular interest in differences in human capital across space. His current work analyzes how the local concentration of college-educated workers in a city impacts the wages and productivity of the city’s broader workforce.

Sreeraahul Kancherla is a Ph.D. Candidate in Economics at UC Berkeley. His research agenda generally analyzes ways in which the US tax, transfer, and social insurance system has shaped income, inequality, and labor market dynamics. A key emphasis of this research is to understand the ways in which workers respond to income shocks, with a particular focus on unemployment and job search. His other projects study capital gains taxation, independent contracting, and tax enforcement. Kancherla graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2017 with dual honors in mathematics and economics.

Runjiu’s research focuses on topics in labor economics, development economics, and the economics of education. Her dissertation studies how university labels affect students’ school choices in China. She also examines how education affects son preferences and the gender ratio of the next generation in Indonesia. She came to Berkeley in 2018 after her undergraduate study at Peking University. 

Leïla Njee Bugha is a 5th year PhD candidate in the Agriculture and Resources Economics department. She studied at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris-Saclay and at Sciences Po Paris in France, before starting a career in the field of program evaluation of public policies. As a PhD student, she specializes in development and labor economics, with a focus on understanding the barriers to women’s employment in West and Central Africa. Her most recent project focuses on transportation barriers as an informality trap for women working in Nigeria and Ghana.

Daniela is a Ph.D. student in Economics at UC Berkeley. Her research interests are broad and include a variety of topics related to applied microeconomics. One of her projects focuses on gender disparities in public transportation. Lack of safe transport can translate into girls missing schools, women not looking for jobs far away from home, giving up their jobs, or being unable to access health or childcare services. In Santiago, Chile, the government will implement “safe bus stops” to reduce the number of crimes and violence women experience in the transportation system. This study aims to study this program and establish if this type of intervention could change women’s commuting decisions.

Jasmine Sanders is a Sociology PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research centers issues of equity and access with a focus on organizations, culture, and workplace policies and practices. Her dissertation examines the role of extracurricular work activities, like happy hours and holiday parties, in career advancement. Jasmine has contributed to research exploring organizational policies and practices that engender equality in college sports, belonging in the workplace, and gendered conceptions of work-life balance in tech companies. She has a BA in English from Spelman College, and a master’s degree in Sociology and Education from Columbia University. 

Elena is a PhD student in the Agricultural and Resource Economics department, focused on environmental economics, climate change, and natural disasters. She and co-authors are conducting a study to examine the effects of natural disasters on households’ aspirations and livelihood decisions in the context of severe floods in Nigeria. Results from the study will be used to evaluate the contribution of psychological pathways to the impacts of natural disasters on labor supply and structural transformation.

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 development, labor, and education economics. His project aims to explore the effects of South Korea’s blind hiring policy on high school and college students’ educational investment and labor market decisions.

Carmen Brick is a sociologist whose research focuses upon low-wage work, stratification processes, and social policy. Her dissertation research uses mixed methods to examine the potential of state-level Earned Income Tax Credits (EITCs) to reduce poverty and inequality by studying the contexts of their adoption. Carmen’s other research projects include a study the effects of firm-level sorting on the gender wage gap. The Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy and the Josephine de Karman Fellowship Trust provide support for her research.

Becky Cardinali is a PhD candidate in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley. She conducts applied microeconomics research at the intersection of development, labor, behavioral, and health economics. Her project aims to understand the long-term impacts of online sexual education and teenage pregnancy on education and labor market outcomes in Colombia.

Originally from Melbourne, Australia, Jenae Carpenter is in the third year of her PhD in sociology at UC Berkeley. This research deploys a neo-Bourdieusian framework and combines interview, ethnographic and historical methods to provide a relational portrait of the film industry. It complements  the view “from above”—the social structures that enable social differentiation, closure and reproduction—with the view “from below”—spotlighting the symbolic structures drawing individuals to the industry, filling them with the belief they can “make it.” In this study therefore, I hope to understand the ways films and filmmakers are valued, differentiated from one another (‘acts of classification’) and how they attempt to differentiate themselves from one another (‘classifiable acts’) such that some individuals are able to rise from the pack and become a winning commodity.

Chiman is a PhD candidate in the department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Berkeley. His research centers around China’s rise as a global superpower and its economic and political implications for the rest of the World. His current project supported by IRLE assesses the impacts of increased exports to China on Taiwan’s local labor markets and asks whether these economic impacts contribute or mitigate the trend of rising Taiwanese nationalism observed in the past two decades.

Morgan Foy is a PhD candidate in the Business and Public Policy program at the Haas Business School. Morgan is interested in public and labor economics with a particular focus on issues facing local and state governments. For example, his research studies which teachers continue to join labor unions and the effects of declining unionization on local public schools. In a separate project, Morgan examines whether the civil service system shields government workers from the political process.

Cheng-Kai Hsu is currently a doctoral student in the Department of City and Regional Planning. He holds a BS in Urban Planning from National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, and an MSc in Transport from Imperial College London. His research interests include transportation planning and environmental/occupational health. Focusing on on-demand food-delivery drivers, his current project utilizes low-cost, wearable sensing to characterize their environmental/occupational exposure to air pollution, heat, traffic hazards, etc, and aims to explore the relationship between these exposures and driver behavior.

Livia Alfonsi is an applied micro-economist with research at the intersection of Development, Labor, and Behavioral economics. Her main strand of research focuses on labor market frictions in low-income countries. In separate work, she also studies how human capital investments and social networks affect individual preferences and behaviors.

Keith Brower Brown is a Ph.D. candidate in Geography at UC Berkeley. Drawing on his past work in California’s clean energy sector and labor organizing roles, his dissertation researches how a boom in unionized solar and high-speed rail jobs in the San Joaquin Valley has shifted labor conditions and worker power. Along with IRLE, Keith’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the UC Berkeley Latinxs & The Environment Initiative, and the journal Human Geography. His prior work has been published in the Journal of the American Planning Association, New Geographies, Antipode, Climate & Development, and Labor Notes.

Derek Brown is a Ph.D. student in Management of Organizations at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Derek explores the psychological barriers that curb efforts to reduce inequality within organizations and society. In particular, he studies the ways that diversity, prejudice, nonverbal behavior, and hierarchy shape how we interact with others and the increasingly diverse society around us.

Combining insights from behavioral economics to labor economics, my research agenda focuses on understanding the determinants of job search in low-income countries, where informal labor markets are widespread. In a current project, I explore the causes of persistent over-optimism in job finding probability among casual workers in India. I hope that my research can contribute to our understanding of how poverty and its interplay with (lack of) institutions can affect workers’ decision-making.

Justin Germain is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Justin’s research centers around the ways that physical space influences social and economic inequality, and is working with IRLE to understand how transportation barriers affect employment opportunities for low-income families living in rural areas.

Arlyn Moreno Luna is a doctoral student in the Critical Studies of Race, Class, and Gender program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. Her scholarly interests include access and equity to early childhood education for migrant workers, barriers that migrant workers face as they access early childhood education, and access and equity in higher education for first-generation and traditionally underrepresented students. Arlyn was born and raised in Mexico, migrating to the U.S. as a teen. She received her Bachelor of Science in BioResource Research in 2013 (with Honors) and a Master of Public Policy, with a focus in Social Justice in 2015 from Oregon State University. In 2021, Arlyn received a Master of Arts in Education from the University of California, Berkeley.

Cristóbal is a PhD Candidate in Economics at UC Berkeley. He holds a BA and an MA in Economics from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He also obtained an MSc in Philosophy of the Social Sciences from the London School of Economics. His fields of interest are labor and public economics, and more broadly public policy. His website can be found here.

Zabdi Salazar is a rising third-year student in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) PhD program at UC Berkeley. Her research interests include refugee and asylum law, immigration law, sociology of law, and administrative law. Her current project explores the impact of a case quota policy on US immigration judges. The study will use a difference-in-difference (DiD) approach to examine how the fiscal year (FY) 2019 performance standards, particularly the requirement for judges to complete 700 cases each year, impacted judicial behavior and case outcomes.

Alex Stephenson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science, where he researches the effects of past discrimination on modern political and economic inclusion, order, and violence. He is also interested in developing methods and tools for causal inference. His research supported by IRLE experimentally assesses whether learning about the historical roots of present-day segregation affects respondents’ support for addressing present-day racial inequity in the United States via redistribution.

Enrique Valencia López is a PhD student in the Policy, Politics and Leadership cluster at the Graduate School of Education. His research interests relate to three broad areas: the stratification of education by gender, immigration status and ethnicity; the measurement of teacher working conditions and well-being; and education in Latin America. He is currently researching (with Arlyn Moreno) the attitudes of farmworker immigrants towards early childhood care using mixed methods. The research aims to inform the main drivers and constraints Migrant Farm workers face when choosing options for early care for their children.

Liubing Xie’s research focuses on social-spatial inequality, living conditions, and lived experiences of migrant workers in Chinese and Indian cities at the intersection of migration, labor, and housing studies. He is especially interested in investigating the recent Chinese and Indian state initiatives to promote market-led but state-mediated rental housing for both skilled/educated and unskilled migrant labor forces in the large cities in China and India. He pursues these topics primarily through the methods of comparative urban studies and urban ethnography.

Alan Yan is a PhD student in the Political Science department. The primary question motivating much of his research is: Why isn’t there a rise in left voting as inequality has risen? His main focus is on class in American politics. Specifically, he is interested in how people conceptualize class, how people connect their class to politics, and how people understand their class interests. He is also interested in questions related to workplace democracy, ideology, and race.