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Belinda Acuna is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Economics. Her main interests are agricultural policy, immigrant labor, and international migration. She began the Ph.D. program in fall 2004 after attending Arizona State University, where she earned both a B.S. in Economics and a B.A. in French. After graduating this summer, Belinda will begin work at the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. She will be participating in the UC DIGSSS Summer Research program to complete her dissertation writing and prepare for her transition from doctoral student to researcher for a federal agency.
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Douglas T. Bonilla, a New Jersey native, seeks to carve out his own path after having completed his first year in the Department of Communication He received his B.A. and M.A. in communication from Rutgers University. He is currently pursuing a second M.A. in the same area with a Ph.D. to follow under the mentorship of Dr. Howard Giles. His research interests focus on inter-group processes of communication and the effects of social identity within the context of police-civilian interaction and gangs. |
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William Calvo, a third-year graduate student in the Department of Chicana/o Studies received his M.S. in design, with an emphasis in methodology, history and criticism, from Arizona State University. Calvo’s research interest developed around culture design and the notion of the construction of individual and collective identities through the use of objects. His thesis, “Chicana/o Epistemologies” focuses on the relationship between knowledge, power and the empire. Particularly, he is interested in the decoloniality of knowledge and the recognition of unique systems of knowledge within the Chicana/o community and their relation with cultural practices, or Barriologies, as a vast project of epistemological emancipation and self valorization of Chicana/os. |
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Mary Danis is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication. She earned a B.A. in political science and communication from Loyola University and and an M.A. in mass communication from St. Louis University. Mary’s research areas include media and intercultural/intergroup communication. Her dissertation, "Muslims in the Media: Social Consequences for Muslims in America", focuses on how the media’s post-9/11 portrayals of Muslims impact stereotypes and racism in the United States. More importantly, it explores how images of Muslims in the media impact Muslims with regard to self-esteem, identity issues, and acculturation patterns. |
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Brianne Dávila is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology, where she also earned an M.A. She received a B.A. in sociology, with a minor in Spanish, from Pitzer College in Claremont, CA. Her research interests include race/ethnicity, inequality, identity, and education. Brianne has previous research experience as an Urban Education Research Fellow for the Los Angeles Unified School District and is currently a research assistant at the Center for Urban Education at the University of Southern California. Under the mentorship of Dr. Denise Segura, Brianne is collecting data for her dissertation, a high school ethnography that explores the experiences of students of color in special education, with a focus on the development of racial and ethnic identity. |
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Theresa De Los Santos is a first-year graduate student in the Department of Communication. She earned her M.A. in media communication from Pepperdine University. Before returning to graduate school, Theresa worked for seven years as a news producer at stations in Colorado Springs, San Diego, and most recently in Los Angeles for FOX 11 (KTTV). At the broadest level, Theresa’s research interests include media effects and emotion with a focus on underrepresented groups. This research encompasses, but is not limited to, representations of minority groups in the news and their access to new media. Currently, Theresa is in the final stages of developing a socially timely research project aimed at understanding television news’ framing of the illegal immigration debate and how this coverage influences public perceptions and judgments of immigrants. |
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Francisco (Franky) Fuentes received his B.A. in global cultures and ideologies and is now a third year Ph.D. student in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies. In addition to serving as a teaching assistant at UC Santa Barbara, Franky served as an instructor at Cal State University, Los Angeles, teaching "Religion, Migration, and Identity in the Americas," an upper-division course cross-listed under Chicano Studies, Religious Studies, and Latin American Studies. He has been involved as a graduate researcher in the Library’s California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives (CEMA), the Chicano Studies Institute, and has worked with Professor Victor Rios as a graduate researcher for the project “Youth Obstacles, Resilience and Subculture in Santa Barbara.” Franky is currently working on CEMA's ImaginArte documentary on Leo Limon, an artist from East Los Angeles. |
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Egidio “EG” Garay, a first-year graduate student in the Department of Political Science, earned his B.A. in political science from Azusa Pacific University. EG taught middle and high school social science while earning his M.A. in political science at California State University, Los Angeles. His research interests are political psychology (with emphasis on cognition, affective components of decision-making, and the impact of information deficits on political decision-making). In collaboration with faculty mentor, Eric R. A. N. Smith, EG intends to pursue a career in academia and hopes to advance a deeper understanding of politics, as well as challenge students and the public at large to think more systematically about political phenomena in the United States. |
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Mario Guerrero will begin his fourth year in the Political Science Department. His fields of specialty are American politics, methodology, and international relations. Mario is particularly interested in studying voting behavior, elections, and public opinion. He earned his B.A. from UCLA and M.A. from UC Santa Barbara. With the support of Dr. Garrett Glasgow, Mario is currently preparing to defend his dissertation prospectus by the end of the summer. He plans to present a multi-method study on the effects of campaign spending in elections, specifically looking at how different candidates strategically use money in political campaigns. |
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Monica Lomeli graduated with two B.A. degrees in anthropology and behavioral science from California State University, Dominguez Hills. A second-year graduate student in the Department of Sociology, she is researching graduate students of color whose scholarship focuses on race. Specifically, she looks at issues of authentication of people of color as researchers and validation of their research on race in sociology. Under the mentorship of Denise Segura, Monica’s M.A. research stems from a collaborative research project with the American Sociological Association on the experiences of graduate students in sociology across the United States. Her general research interests include sociology of education, race and ethnicity, and higher education. |
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Tomas Alberto Madrigal, a digital media activist and cultural worker, is a third-year student in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies. He received his M.A. in American Studies at Washington State University in 2005 by completing a thesis entitled “Rendering Chicana and Chicano Experiences of the Pacific Northwest through Prose.” His current research examines working class struggles, gender and place making in the Mexican/Chicana/o Diaspora. His M.A. qualifying paper, “Just Another Little Hole in the Wall’: A Case Study of a Mexican-owned Barbershop in Goleta, California”, examines the experiences of barbers and customers of a barbershop in a Mexican/Chicana/o community. |
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Maritza Maksimow is a third-year graduate student in the Department of Anthropology. A socio-cultural anthropologist, she is investigating the social, economic and political development of the Alta-Baja California borderlands. More specifically, she is researching the dialectical relationship between the political economy of the Alta-Baja California border region and the formation of borderland cultures and identities. Maritza is also a member of several student organizations on campus including La Colectiva, Women of Color in Academia, and the Anthropology Graduate Student Association. |
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Ron Robinson is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Sociology who earned advanced degrees from MIT and Cornell. He completed the coursework for a doctoral program in transformative learning and change at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where he also taught embodied mathematics and cultural cognition. After a long stint in the private sector, Ron taught social science in various inner-city high schools. Under the leadership of his faculty mentor, Dr. Geoff Raymond, Ron is combining social interaction with cognitive neuroscience to design effective, culturally relevant social justice interventions. |
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Jamila Sinlao holds a B.A. in sociology from the University of San Francisco and is entering her second year as a graduate student in the Department of Sociology. During the summer, Jamila will begin developing her master’s thesis, a comparative-historical, interdisciplinary project which interrogates the ideological underpinnings of American etiquette of the 1920s, particularly for African Americans. Working under the direction of her mentor, Dr. Denise Bielby, Jamila hopes that studying the rules, guidelines, and practices which surround important ceremonies such as weddings will offer a deeper understanding of how etiquette functions to guide and shape race, class and gender identity, social behavior, and status. |
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S. Courtney Walton is about to begin her second year in the Department of
Communication, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in organizational communication and media with an emphasis in technology and society. Courtney has a B.S. in Communication Studies from Northwestern University and earned an M.A. in communication management through the Annenberg Program on Online Communities at the University of Southern California. Interested in working with data and on research projects related to the attitudes and behaviors of mobile phone users, Courtney will be participating in the UC DIGSSS Summer Research program to begin work on her thesis under the mentorship of her advisor
Dr. Ronald E. Rice. |
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