Elsadig Elsheikh
Elsadig Elsheikh is a researcher and project manager of the global justice program at the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, where he oversees the build-up of the Institute's network and the global justice program.
Prior joining the Haas Institute, Elsadig directed the global justice program of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at the Ohio State University, where he also served as an associate editor of the Institute’s journal Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary in Global Contexts. Before that, he worked with various international grassroots and advocacy organizations on issues of internal displaced persons, indigenous population, human rights, immigration, social mobilization, and environmental and social justice in Sudan, Greece, Colombia, and the United States.
Elsadig’s research interests are on the themes and social-dynamics related to the study of structural racialization and institutional racism; colonial and postcolonial politics; human and Indigenous peoples’ rights; political ecology; state and citizenship; and social movements.
Veronica Hash
Veronica Hash is the Administrative Officer of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society and Executive Assistant to john powell. Prior to this position, she was the Professional Skills Program Assistant at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. Since 2004, she has been a Performing Arts educator throughout California, specializing in all forms of dance, as well as, yoga, gymnastics and preschool music.
She is also involved in the special needs community; since moving to the Bay Area, she has served as a program coordinator and volunteer coach for e-soccer, an inclusive soccer program for players of all abilities.
Veronica Hash is an active member of the University of California, Berkeley’s Black Staff & Faculty Organization.
Stephen Menendian
Stephen Menendian is the Assistant Director at the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, and the former senior legal associate at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at the Ohio State University. Stephen is the author of many law review articles, scholarly publications and a frequent contributor to Race-Talk.org.
Stephen co-authored the Institute’s United States Supreme Court Amicus brief in Fisher v. Texas, asking the Court to uphold the University of Texas’ race-conscious admissions policy, as well as an Amicus brief in the 2007 Seattle/Louisville K-12 integration cases to persuade the Court to sustain voluntary integration plans in the Seattle and Louisville school districts. Recent scholarly publications include "Beyond Public/Private: Understanding Excessive Corporate Prerogative" for the Kentucky Law Journal, "Remaking Law: Moving Beyond Enlightenment Jurisprudence" for the St. Louis University Law Journal, "Parents Involved: The Mantle of Brown, the Shadow of Plessy" for the University of Louisville Law Review, and "Little Rock and the Legacy of Dred Scott" for the St. Louis Law Journal.
Stephen has trained policymakers, businesses, and other institutions on diversity, inclusion, and affirmative action practices, policies, and compliance, including creative ways to improve diversity within bounds of law. Stephen presented as part of the Ohio Department of Administrative Services Equal Opportunity Division’s training academy, and for the Moritz College of Law, the Graduate School of Education, the Multicultural Center, and on behalf of the Columbus Bar Association. Stephen published a guidebook on affirmative action for policymakers and advocates on behalf of the Kirwan Institute. Most recently, Stephen authored the State of Ohio’s new Diversity Strategies For Successful Schools Guidance which was adopted by the State Board of Education of Ohio in May, 2012.
Stephen has guest-lectured at UC Berkeley School of Law, the Moritz College of Law at the Ohio State University, and co-taught The History and Culture of Race and Law, a seminar at Wayne State University Law School, in the fall of 2009. Stephen is a licensed attorney.
Kathryn Moeller
Kathryn Moeller is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society. She recently completed her Ph.D. in Education with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, & Sexuality from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to graduate school, she was a high school teacher.
Michael Omi
Michael Omi is Associate Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies and Associate Director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the co-author of Racial Formation in the United States, a groundbreaking work that transformed how we understand the social and historical forces that give race its changing meaning over time and place.
Since 1995, he has been the co-editor of the book series on Asian American History and Culture at Temple University Press. From 1999 to 2008, he served as a member and chair of the Daniel E. Koshland Committee for Civic Unity at the San Francisco Foundation. He is founding member of the faculty steering committee of the Center for New Racial Studies, a University of California Multi-Campus Research Project based at UC Santa Barbara.
Michael Omi is a recipient of UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award — an honor bestowed on only 240 Berkeley faculty members since the award’s inception in 1959.
john powell
As of January 1, 2012, Professor john a. powell (lower case) is Director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society and Robert D. Haas Chancellor’s Chair in Equity and Inclusion at the University of California, Berkeley. From 2003 to the end of 2011, he was Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University and Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Right and Civil Liberties at Ohio State’s Moritz College of Law. Under his direction, the Kirwan Institute has emerged as a national leader on research and scholarship related to race, structural racism, racialized space and opportunity. He has been a leader in developing an “opportunity-based” housing model that provides a critical and creative framework for thinking about affordable housing, racialized space, and the many ways that housing influences other opportunity domains including education, health, health care, and employment.
Professor powell is an internationally recognized authority in the areas of civil rights and civil liberties and the intersection of race with a wide range of issues including housing, education, poverty, democracy and identity. He has written extensively on a host of topics related to race including structural racism, social justice, corporate power, implicit bias, regionalism, concentrated poverty and urban sprawl, opportunity based housing, integration, affirmative action in the United States, South Africa and Brazil, racial identity, and the needs of citizens in a democratic society. He is highly regarded as a public speaker.
Previously, Professor powell founded and directed the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota. He also served as Director of Legal Services of Greater Miami and was National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union where he was instrumental in developing educational adequacy theory. He has taught at numerous law schools including The Ohio State University, Harvard University and Columbia University. He earned an undergraduate degree in psychology at Stanford University and the Juris Doctor at the University of California, Berkeley (Boalt Hall).
Professor powell has worked and lived in Africa, where he was a consultant to the governments of Mozambique and South Africa. He has also lived and worked in India and has done work in South America and Europe. He is one of the co-founders of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC) and serves on the board of several national organizations.
