Fabiola is a third-year doctoral student at UC Merced Public Health and scholar of immigrant health. She is a first-generation college student, born and raised in an immigrant farmworker family in the California Central Valley. Fabiola applies social theories of racial social disparities, such as political economy of health and structural violence, and to study the role of the agricultural industry and the immigration system on farmworker health.
Alicia Poole is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at McGill University. Her research examines how migrants fleeing conflict negotiate migration policy regimes along multistage journeys and uses mainly qualitative methods. Her work has been funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC) and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), has appeared in The Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and is forthcoming in International Migration Review.
Damini Purkayastha is a PhD researcher at Interface Demography, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium and a Visiting Scholar at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, The Grad Centre, CUNY. Her doctoral research, funded by the EU Horizon 2020 HumMingBird project, focuses on the lived experience of skilled migration policies in Europe. Voices of migrants shape her analysis of labour market restrictions in Europe, as she examines how intersections with gender, race, and class exacerbate existing inequalities. Damini has an MA in English Literature (LSR, Delhi University, India...
Huiguang is a doctoral student in the Applied Developmental Psychology program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Zhejiang University in 2016 and his Master’s degree in Developmental Psychology from East China Normal University in 2019. Huiguang’s overall research focuses on Asian immigrant parents’ parenting cognition, practices, and their contributions to children’s social-emotional development.
Zabdi Salazar is a 2L at Berkeley Law, where she serves as the Managing Editor for the California Law Review. She is also a fourth year student in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy (JSP) PhD program at Berkeley Law. Her research interests include refugee and asylum law, immigration law, administrative law, and sociology of law. She aspires to become a law professor and contribute to the socio-legal literature on immigration.
National Science Foundation SBE Postdoctoral Fellow
I am a National Science Foundation SBE Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California. My research examines how housing shapes family wellbeing, and much of my work uses in-depth interviews with renters to show how the affordable housing crisis widens inequalities among families. In particular, I focus on the rental experiences of Latino/a/x immigrants, who are underrepresented in urban sociological research. I received a PhD in sociology at UC Irvine and a BA in Spanish from Kenyon College.
Priyanka Sethy is a PhD Student at the Department of Government at Harvard University. Her research interests are in immigrant identity formation, social trust, and diaspora communities - particularly the Indian diaspora. Prior to starting her PhD, she took an MPA from Columbia University and a Bachelors’ in Political Science from the University of Chicago. She also worked as a management consultant in public health. Priyanka is from Dehra Dun, a town in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas. In her free time, she makes art and constructs crosswords.
Yolanda Valencia is a feminist Mexican immigrant scholar, writer and teacher. In 2019, Dr. Valencia completed her PhD in geography at the University of Washington, Seattle. That same year, she joined UMBC as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography and Environmental System. Drawing on transnational approaches, her work focuses on understanding how undocumented immigrants make a meaningful life in the midst of state-sponsored violence in the United States. Developing the concepts of Relational life and legal death, Dr. Valencia is currently working on two journal articles and a...
Rebecca Woofter is a doctoral student at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health in the department of Community Health Sciences. She holds a BA from Emory University in History and Political Science and an MPH from Washington University in St. Louis in Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Rebecca studies maternal and reproductive health, particularly access to and quality of healthcare, pregnancy outcomes, and contraceptive use. Her work examines the social, institutional, and structural barriers to achieving reproductive justice among birthing people of color and immigrants in the U.S.