Graduate Research Awards
IRLE provides flexible funds (up to $6,000) to qualified masters and doctoral students to advance student research projects in partnership with a faculty advisor or mentor.
IRLE supports rigorous interdisciplinary research projects on topics aligned with our mission: to understand the dynamics and policies affecting workers, working life, and employment. We are inviting applications from UC Berkeley graduate and doctoral students. Applications for the 2023-24 awards cycle are now closed. Check back in spring 2024 for 2024-2025 award application details.
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.
Awards Program Details
IRLE offers two graduate awards that graduate students may apply for:
- Graduate student research award: Flexible funds designed to advance student research projects in partnership with a faculty advisor or mentor. Details below.
- Dissertation fellowship: Students nearing completion of a dissertation related to IRLE’s mission can receive a one time stipend plus resident tuition and fees to support them during the completion of their dissertation. Learn more about the dissertation fellowship program.
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.
- Up to $6,000
- Allowable expenses include, but are not limited to, acquiring data, purchasing services (e.g., digitizing documents), or necessary travel.
- Funds may not be used to pay a salary/stipend for the applicant, or to cover university fees.
- Funds must be spent by May 30th, 2024.
- We 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.
- Masters and doctoral students with a GPA above 3.0 and no incompletes.
- Applicants must be in residence at UC Berkeley and not on leave during the grant period (working remote is permitted).
To apply, complete this form to submit the following:
- Short description (1000 words or less) of your research question, methodological approach, and how IRLE funding will be used to advance the project.
- Budget (An optional template is provided here).
- Current official or unofficial transcript.
- Complete proposals must be submitted by Friday, April 7, 2023.
- Awardees will be notified by May 12, 2023.
Current and Past Awardees
Raheem Chaudry
Ph.D. Candidate in Public Policy
project: Public Housing, Neighborhood Quality, and Children’s Long-Term Outcomes
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
Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology
project: When the Policed Become Police: Poverty Governance, Reentry, and Urban Insecurity in California
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
Ph.D. Candidate in Economics
project: Human Capital Spillovers and the Role of College Quality: Evidence from Texas
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
Ph.D. Candidate in Economics
project: The Educational Effects of Financial Aid: Evidence from the Texas FAFSA Mandate
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 Liu
Ph.D. Candidate in Economics
project: China “World Class University” Label and Students’ College Choices
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.
Leila Njee Bugha
Ph.D. Candidate in Agriculture and Resources Economics
project: Spatial Mismatch and Employment in African Cities
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 Paz Cruzat
Ph.D. Candidate in Economics
project: The Economic Effects of Safe Transportation in Developing Cities
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
Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology
project: Partying to Promotion: An Exploration of Extracurricular Work Events and Career Advancement
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 Stacy
Ph.D. Candidate in Agricultural and Resource Economics
project: Flooding the Mind: Flood Shocks, Aspirations, and Labor Supply in Nigeria
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
Ph.D. Candidate in Agricultural and Resource Economics
project: The Effects of Labor Market Discrimination on Students’ Educational Choices
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
Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology
project: Examining Social Inclusion in the Tax-Based Welfare System
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
Ph.D. Candidate in Agricultural and Resource Economics
project: Impacts of Teenage Pregnancy on Education and Labor Market Outcomes in Colombia: Evidence Using a Randomized Sexual Education Program
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.
Jenae Carpenter
Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology
project: Getting into the Club: The Social and Symbolic Structures of the Film Industry
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 Cheung
Ph.D. Candidate in Agricultural and Resource Economics
project: Doing Business with China: The Impacts of Growing Export Market on Local Labor Markets in Taiwan
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
Ph.D. Candidate in Business and Public Policy
project: Selection into Union Membership
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
Ph.D. Candidate in City and Regional Planning
project: Unshielded on the Road: Traffic-related Environmental/Occupational Exposures of Gig Food-Delivery Motorcyclists in Kaohsiung, Taiwan
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
Ph.D. Candidate in Agricultural and Resource Economics
project: The Shecession of 2020: Evidence from Uganda
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
Ph.D. Candidate in Geography
project: Solar Power and Worker Power in California’s San Joaquin Valley
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
Ph.D. Candidate in Management of Organizations
project: Equality is Misperceived as Harmful to Advantaged Groups
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.
Luisa Cefala
Ph.D. Candidate in Economics
project: The Causes and Consequences of Persistent Over-Optimism among Job-Seekers
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
Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology
project: On the Road Again: Spatial Barriers to Employment Among the Rural Poor
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
Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology
project: Migrant Workers’ Attitudes Toward Early Childhood Care
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.
Cristobal Otero
Ph.D. Candidate in Economics
project: The Effects of Managers on Public Health Outcomes: Evidence from Chile
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
Ph.D. Candidate in Jurisprudence and Social Policy
project: Immigration Judges & Bureaucracy: The Impact of Case Quotas
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
Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science
project: The Effect of Knowledge of Racial Covenants on Attitudes towards Present-Day Redistribution
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 Lopez
Ph.D. Candidate in Policy, Politics, and Leadership
project: Migrant Workers’ Attitudes Toward Early Childhood Care
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
Ph.D. Candidate in City and Regional Planning
project: Governing Migrant Labor through Rental Housing: Differentiated Rental Housing Schemes for Migrants in China and India
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
Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science
project: Class-Based Origins of Immigration Attitudes
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.
Felipe Lobel
Economics
project: Effects of Corporate Tax Subsidy to Small Firms in Brazil
Christopher Lowenstein
Health Policy
project: To study labor market conditions and related policies as determinants of health and as tools for improving health among vulnerable populations.
Tatiana Reyes Hinrichsen
Economics
project: Higher Education Admission Policy in Chile for High Achieving Underrepresended Students
Alicia Sheares
Sociology
project: Black Technology Entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley and Atlanta
Felipe Vial
Economics
project: Spatial Mismatch and Transit Infrastructure
Nicholas Anderman
Geography
project: Laboring with Machines: Automation and Socio-Cultural Change in the Maritime Transport Industry
Alexandra Appelbaum
City and Regional Planning
project: Infrastructures of Inequality: Security Guards in Johannesburg, South Africa
Christopher Campos
Economics
project: Understanding Parental Preferences for Schools
Joshua Choper
Sociology
project: Organizational and Demographic Determinants of Manager Bias in Work Scheduling
Caleb Dawson
Graduate School of Education
project: Black Interests, Institutional Commitments, and Sources of Support at UC Berkeley
Cristobal Otero
Economics
project: The Dynamics of Wage Differentials: Evidence from the Public Sector
Nina Roussille
City and Regional Planning
project: The Gender Ask Gap
Katherine Savin
Social Welfare
project: “Being on SSI is a full-time Job”: Making Disability Work
Adam Storer
Sociology
project: How Do Low-Wage Workers Evaluate Their Job Quality Following Changes to Their Employer’s Wage and Benefit Structure?
Matthew Unrath
Goldman School of Public Policy
project: Employer Search and Job Postings
Zach Bleemer
Economics
project: Long-Run Wage Returns by Field of Study
Carmen Brick
Sociology
project: Welfare State Development and Low-Wage Labor Markets: Examining Variation in the Adoption of State Earned Income Tax Credits
Angelo Dagonel
Political Science
project: Understanding Parental Employee verification and unauthorized immigrant earnings for Schools
Alinaya Fabros
Sociology
project: The Making of Transnational Labor Force: An Interngenerational Study of Global Labor Circulation from the Philippines, 1974-2016
Isabel Garcia Valdivia
Sociology
project: Aging Immigrants: The Effects of Legal Status on Old Age Mexican-Origin Immigrants
Ingrid Haegele
Economics
project: Biases in HR Practices and Labor Market Disparities
Anne E. Jonas
School of Information
project: Virtual Hell? The Changing Nature of Teaching in Online Schools
Joe LaBriola
Sociology
project: Estimating Causal Effects of Employment in ‘Good’ versus ‘Bad’ Industries After Release from Prison
Preston Mui
Economics
project: The Aggregate Labor Supply Curve at the Extension Margin: A Reservation Wage Approach
Pablo Muñoz-Henríquez
Economics
project: Labor Market Returns to Student Loans
Manaswini Rao
ARE
project: Gender Wage Gap in Agricultural Labor Markets in Rural India
Vaishnavi Surendra
ARE
project: Gender Wage Gap in Agricultural Labor Markets in Rural India
Diana Reddy
Jurisprudence and Social Policy
project: Organized Labor as Interest Group, Organized Labor as Social Movement: Framing and Collective Identity in Class-Based Contention after Neoliberalism
Andy Scott Chang
Sociology
project: Globalization from Below: Migration, Gender, and Cultural Change in Indonesia and Taiwan
Saika Shaolin Belal
ARE
project: Does an unpredictable work schedule impede ability to plan?
Sarah Stoller
History
project: Inventing the Working Parent: Work, Gender, and Feminism in Neoliberal Britain
Clara Turner
City and Regional Planning
project: Economic Impacts of Naturalization on Young Immigrants
Matthew Unrath
Public Policy
project: Evaluation of Trade Adjustment Assistance
Sigrid Willa Luhr
Sociology
project: Diversity and Inclusion in the San Francisco Bay Area Tech Industry
Paula Winicki
Sociology
project: Organizing Despite Precarity