2021 - 2022
Cheryl Yin
Cheryl Yin is a 2021-2022 Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies working with Professor Penny Edwards. A linguistic anthropologist with expertise in Cambodia, her research argues that contestations about the Khmer (Cambodian) language are ultimately contestations about how to (re)define Cambodian national identity after decades of turmoil and then accelerated economic growth.
In addition to turning her dissertation into a book manuscript, Cheryl’s next project “My Great-Grandfather’s First Wife: Alternative Legacies of Chinese Migration” will examine the impact of Chinese migration into Southeast Asia from the point of view of the people and villages left behind. Her work will center the voices of those who are often forgotten in conversations about Chinese migration.
Cheryl received her PhD and MA in Linguistic Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She earned her BA from Pitzer College, double majoring in Anthropology and Linguistics. As a first-generation student, born and raised in Long Beach, CA, Cheryl is committed to mentoring students from minoritized backgrounds and looks forward to continuing her outreach in the UC Berkeley community.
2020 - 2021
Anila Daulatzai
2019-2021
Kasey Pregler
Kasey Pregler is a 2019-2020 Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. Her research uses demographic information to better inform community and population ecology, life history evolution, and the conservation of imperiled fish species. Kasey also conducts research on the conservation genetics of aquatic species for restoration efforts.
Her current research will be investigating a captive breeding program for Coho salmon in the Russian River Watershed to assess the success of the program in collaboration with NOAA and Sea Grant researchers. Results of this work will help inform new program efforts that are under consideration for nearby watersheds in California, and will also be applicable for conservation efforts for a suite of imperiled fishes.
Kasey received her BS and MS in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Connecticut, and a PhD in Fish, Wildlife, & Conservation Biology from Colorado State University. In addition to research, she has mentored numerous undergraduate students through various programs to provide equal opportunities for students to gain experience in their field.
You can learn more about Dr. Pregler at: https://kaseypregler.com/
2019-2020
Paul M. B. Gutierrez
Paul M. B. Gutierrez is a 2019-2020 Chancellor’s Fellow with the UC Berkeley School of Law and its Center for the Study of Law and Society. His research and teaching lie at the intersections of Legal and Constitutional Studies; Political Theory; Race, Ethnicity, and Politics; and American Political Development. Paul is broadly concerned with how the emergence and development of major political-economic and legal institutions like “contract” intersect with histories and processes of imperialism, colonialism, and racialization. His dissertation disinterred and examined the settler colonial and revolutionary origins of the modern corporation in the U.S.
Paul holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Brown University. He also has an M.P.P. from the Harvard Kennedy School, where he concentrated in Democracy, Politics, and Institutions; and a B.A. magna cum laude from the College of William and Mary, where he majored in Government and Economics. Paul’s research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, and the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice.
You can learn more about Dr. Gutierrez at: http://www.paulmbgutierrez.com(link is external).
2018-2020
Carolyn Smith
Carolyn Smith (Karuk Tribe) was a 2018-2019 Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research engages with indigenous knowledge to consider how Native American craftworks are profoundly intertwined with people, landscapes, and watersheds. In exploring indigenous ontological understandings of craftworks and their roles within communities, she addresses how museum identification and classification affect which works are eligible for repatriation and how they are represented and stewarded in collection spaces.
Carolyn received a B.A. in Anthropology from Sonoma State University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. Her graduate education was supported by UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Fellowship and her doctoral research was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Carolyn’s dissertation, Weaving pikyav (to-fix-it): Karuk Baskets in-Relation-with the Everyday World, spoke to the extraordinary interrelationship of baskets with nearly every aspect of Karuk daily and ceremonial life, including ontology, traditional ecological knowledge, language, familial and community relationships, identity, and social memory. By foregrounding Karuk histories and cultural traditions, she offered a perspective that countered anthropological studies of basketry, which tend to focus on typology and use value. Her research also revealed that basket weaving provides healing of historical trauma through cultural practice.
Carolyn is a basketweaver and artist. She is a member of the Council for Museum Anthropology, Association of Indigenous Anthropologists, Association of Academic Museums and Galleries, and California Indian Basketweavers Association.
You can learn more about Dr. Smith at: https://berkeley.academia.edu/CarolynSmith
2017
Ari Martínez
Ari Martínez was a 2017-18 Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and Department of Integrative Biology. His research interests that span from animal behavior to community ecology, and primarily uses neo-tropical birds as a study system. Ari’s doctoral research evaluated how communication across species influences the formation of mixed species groups. Currently, his research focuses on describing the details of information produced about food and predators among birds and whether other eavesdropping species can discern amongst different signals that contain different types of information.
Ari’s long-term goals are to link information to individual decision making to species associations and, ultimately, how those species associations affect community-level processes.
Ari received his BA and MA in Biology from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and a PhD in Ecology from the University of Florida. At the University of Florida, he was awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Integrative Graduate Education Training Grant to undertake a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the conservation of tropical forests. He was also the recipient of an NSF Southeastern Alliance for Graduate Education Fellowship. More recently he has received funding from National Geographic.
Ari’s work has been published in Ecology, the American Naturalist, Behavioral Ecology, Oecologia, the Wilson Journal of Ornithology, Ecohealth, and Bird Conservation International. He is a member of the Ecological Society of America, the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation, and the American Ornithological Society.
To learn more about Ari Martinez’ research program, teaching philosophy and outreach initiatives visit: http://arimartinez043.wix.com/birds
2016
Sarah Brown
Sarah Brown’s research focuses on the design and analysis of machine learning methods for use in scientific research. This includes development of machine learning models and algorithms that are reflective of scientific thinking about the data, analyzing their limits in context and developing context-appropriate performance measures.
Sarah Received her BS, MS and PhD from the the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northeastern University. Her graduate studies were supported by a Draper Laboratory Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Her dissertation, Machine Learning Methods for Computational Psychology, develop application-tailored learning solutions and a better understanding of how to interpret machine learning results in the context of studying how the brain creates affective experiences and mental pathologies.
Outside of the lab, Sarah is a passionate advocate for underrepresented STEM engagement at all levels. Currently she serves as treasurer for Women In Machine Learning and previously as finance and sponsorship chair as a co-organizer for the WiML Workshop. She has also served in a variety of leadership positions in the National Society of Black Engineers at both the local and national levels including National Academic Excellence Chair.
Anjuli Verma
Anjuli Verma's research and teaching interests include: social reactions to crime and deviance; law and organizations; legal mobilization and social movements; and mixed-methods research. Anjuli’s doctoral research examines the causes and effects of deinstitutionalization and decarceration in California, with a focus on legal reform and organizational regulation and compliance processes. During her postdoctoral fellowship, Anjuli will launch a new project that examines the “afterlife” of mass incarceration and how prison displacements affect various dimensions of community health, including among elderly parolees.
She received her B.A. in Political & Social Thought at the University of Virginia and her Ph.D. in Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine, where she was awarded the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant and the National Institute of Justice Graduate Research Fellowship.
While sociological scholarship on mass incarceration in the U.S. has surged in recent decades, Anjuli’s research pivots attention to the phenomenon of prison downsizing and investigates the potential for system-wide decarceration as an emergent 21st-century transformation. Her dissertation, The Great Experiment: California's Prison Realignment and the Legal Reform of Mass Incarceration, examines the 2011 “realignment” of California’s unconstitutionally overcrowded prison system as an empirical window into how legal interventions and policy innovations filter to lower levels of government and diffuse into local organizational and professional practices. The project blends group-based trajectory modeling and institutional ethnographic methods to analyze how historical imprisonment trajectories shape the potential for present-day decarceration and institutional change at the local level.
Anjuli’s work has been published in Law & Society Review, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, The Oxford Handbook on Prisons and Imprisonment and The American Journal of Bioethics. Her work is forthcoming in Ethnography andSociological Perspectives.
She is a member of the University of California Criminal Justice & Health Consortium and serves on the advisory board for the non-profit research organization, Justice Strategies. To learn more about Anjuli’s research and teaching, visit: http://sites.uci.edu/anjuliverma/ and https://berkeley.academia.edu/AnjuliCatherineVerma.
2015
Liza Keānuenueokalani Williams
Liza Keānuenueokalani Williams is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholar born in Honolulu and raised in Waimānalo on the island of Oʻahu in Hawaiʻi. Liza received her BA in Psychology and two minors in Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 2008. She completed her PhD in American Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University in May 2015. Her dissertation is titled, "The Politics of Paradise: Tourism, Image, and Cultural Production in Hawaiʻi". Her work explores the colonial legacies, cultural politics, and economic links between tourism, the military, and the prison industrial complex and their intersecting effects on Kānaka Maoli. Liza has received numerous forms of support over the years; most recently she was awarded a Mellon-Hawaiʻi Doctoral Fellowship. Her poetry and writing has appeared inAnamesa, Cirque, and NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America). During her postdoctoral year Liza is conducting research in Hawaiʻi and revising her dissertation for a book manuscript. Liza collaborates with a feminist collective of scholar-activists called Hinemoana of Turtle Island and currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
2014
Rayna Bell
Rayna Bell is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Integrative Biology and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. The overarching goal of her research is to identify mechanisms that contribute to the origin and maintenance of taxonomic and phenotypic diversity. Specifically, she is interested in understanding how micro-evolutionary processes interact with organismal traits to generate diversity among populations and how these processes translate to larger evolutionary scales. Rayna’s research falls into two broad areas: 1) micro-evolutionary processes that shape genetic differentiation, and 2) the evolution of sexual dimorphism in color (sexual dichromatism) in frogs.
Rayna received her B.S. in Integrative Biology from UC Berkeley and her Ph.D. in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology from Cornell University. Her doctoral research focused on the effects of climatic refugia, over-seas dispersal, and sea-level incursions on diversification in Central African reedfrogs. At Cornell, Rayna was supported by the Presidential Life Sciences Fellowship, the Andrew and Margaret Paul Fellowship, and the Provost Diversity Fellowship. Rayna’s dissertation research was funded in part by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant and a National Geographic Young Explorer’s Grant.
Conserving biodiversity in an uncertain future is what initially motivated Rayna’s interests in evolutionary research; consequently her professional activities include science communication and capacity building for biodiversity research in Central Africa.
Russ Corbett-Detig
Russ Corbett-Detig is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Integrative Biology. Broadly, his research examines the ways by which natural selection shapes patterns of genetic variation within and between populations. At UC Berkeley, Russ is studying the demographic history of and the distribution and the properties of gene-gene interactions in an underserved human population: the Inuits of Greenland.
Russ received a B.S. from UC Davis. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, where Russ was supported by a Harvard Prize Graduate Fellowship. During his Ph.D., Russ developed bioinformatic methods to address a wide variety of biological questions, including work aimed at detecting and characterizing gene-gene interactions in the model organism Drosophila melanogaster.
In addition to his research, Russ is active in a variety of scientific outreach activities aimed at educating the general public about science. Furthermore, he is passionate about recruiting, educating, and integrating young scientists into his research, with an emphasis on recruiting students from underrepresented groups.
2013
Sam Diaz-Munoz
Sam Díaz-Muñoz is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology and Integrative Biology. His research focuses on viral evolution, particularly how social interactions between viruses affect genetic exchange (sex) in wild virus strains. Sam's current research examines the population dynamics of bacteria and viruses on leaf surfaces, to gain insight into the ecology and evolution of virus sex.
Sam received his BS in Biology from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez. His doctoral work at UC Berkeley focused on the behavior, ecology, and genetics of tamarin monkeys in Panamá, particularly on cooperative male parental care. His doctoral research was funded by the NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant. Sam has been awarded the National Academies/Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, the UC Chancellor's Opportunity Fellowship and the UC President's Dissertation Year Fellowship. In 2014, Sam will be joining New York University as an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology.
Sam is the Grants Lead and Calendar Coordinator for Ciencia Puerto Rico a grassroots, non-profit organization that runs www.cienciapr.org, an online social network that promotes research and science education in Puerto Rico and beyond.
Kristen Dorsey
Kristen Dorsey is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Her research interests include nanoprinting of electronics and sensors, the design of inertial micro-sensors, and dielectric charging effects in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).
Kristen received her B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. She earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, studying and characterizing the effects of dielectric surface charge on resonant CMOS MEMS devices. In 2013, she was awarded the Neil and Jo Bushnell Fellowship.
Kristen is committed to outreach activities for primary and secondary students. She has organized and participated in several STEM activities to inspire students to consider engineering as a career path.
Jessica Kramer
Dr. Kramer is a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Professor Carolyn Bertozzi in the Department of Chemistry at UC, Berkeley. She completed her B.S. degree in Biochemistry from the University of Utah in 2004, then worked in industry for three years at Echelon Biosciences developing commercial tools for cancer research.
Dr. Kramer obtained her Ph.D. in Chemistry from UCLA in 2012, focusing her studies on the development of new materials for applications in cancer therapeutics and wound healing. Currently, Dr. Kramer is studying glycoproteins on the surface of cancer cells with the goal of developing new diagnostics and therapeutics for cancer patients.
Dr. Kramer has been recognized with many honors and awards for both her research and community outreach accomplishments. She is the 2014 recipient of the UCLA Norma Stoddart Prize for her academic achievements and contributions over 4 years with the California Nanosystems Institute's High School Nanoscience Outreach Program. She has also been recognized with UCLA's Saul and Sylvia Winstein Dissertation Award, the American Chemical Society's Excellence in Graduate Research Award and her graduate research was supported in part by a National Science Foundation fellowship. Currently, her postdoctoral research is supported by both a UC Chancellor's fellowship and a National Institute of Health fellowship. Dr. Kramer is also an active volunteer of the Bay Area Scientist's in Schools program.
Padmini Rangamani
Padmini Rangamani is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. Her goal is to understand complex biological phenomenon from the biophysical and biochemical perspectives. She is broadly interested in mathematical modeling of cellular phenomenon, particularly the cytoskeleton and the plasma membrane. Her postdoctoral research is focused on mathematical descriptions of the lipid bilayer, and understanding the role of lipid orientation in mediating scission.
Padmini received her B.Tech in chemical engineering from Osmania University, India. She pursued her MS in chemical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology where she studied the experimental conditions that affects the growth of engineered cartilage tissues. She earned her PhD in biological sciences from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. Her PhD thesis focused on understanding the physics behind cell spreading and cell shape. Her research work has been published in Biomechanics and Modeling in Mechanobiology, Biophysical Journal and Cell. Her recent efforts as a postdoctoral fellow have been geared towards developing models that capture the finer details of the lipid bilayer such as lipid flow, diffusion and lipid tilt. Her vision is to combine complex biochemical and biophysical details of the cell to provide insight into how cell shape governs cell health.
In addition to her research, Padmini is passionate about recruiting women in science and engineering and mentoring undergraduates and graduate students to pursue research..
Tamar has been actively involved and has served in leadership roles for Graduate Women in Physics at MIT, and is passionate about mentoring women in physics.
Sabrina Strings
Sabrina Strings has a B.A. with High Honors in Psychology from UC Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from UC San Diego. Her research examines the historical development of fat stigma in the United States, and its potential contribution to racial/ethnic and gender disparities in health outcomes. Her book manuscript, Thin, White, and Saved: Fat Stigma and the Fear of the Big Black Body, explores how body size has been used to maintain social hierarchies in the United States.
A former McNair Scholar, Sabrina has received several awards for her research from the African and African American Studies Research Center, the Ujima Network, and the American Association of Blacks in Higher Education. Her recent publications include “She is Not Acting, She IS: The Conflict Between Gender and Racial Realness on RuPaul’s Drag Race,” (co-authored with Long Bui, Ph.D., forthcoming in Feminist Media Studies). Sabrina is a UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow with a joint appointment in the School of Public Health and the Department of Sociology. She is currently working on a project that investigates the social and environmental factors contributing to obesity and adverse health outcomes among women of color.
2012
Tamar Mentzel
Tamar Mentzel is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Physics. Her research focuses on nanostructured semiconductor materials. She has made advances in understanding charge transport in semiconductor nanocrystals and has developed new tools for measuring charge in nanostructured materials. She holds patents for optoelectronic devices made of semiconductor nanocrystals and for developing a novel technique for measuring electrical conductance in extremely resistive materials that is independent of contact effects. She is also credited with making the first electrically conductive, nanopatterned films of semiconductor nanocrystals.
Tamar received her BS from Yale University where she majored in physics and mechanical engineering, and won the Deforest Pioneer Prize for Distinguished Creative Achievement in Physics at Yale. She earned her PhD in Applied Physics from Harvard University after which she was a postdoc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology jointly in the Departments of Physics and Chemistry. At MIT she delivered the prized Microsystems Technology Laboratory Annual Doctoral Dissertation Seminar. As a graduate student, her research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program and the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship Program.
Tamar has been actively involved and has served in leadership roles for Graduate Women in Physics at MIT, and is passionate about mentoring women in physics.
Victor Pineda
Victor Santiago Pineda, Ph.D. is the Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow for Academic Diversity at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Pineda's teaching, research and service focuses on promoting equitable outcomes for persons with disabilities, both at home and abroad.
Dr. Pineda has taught courses on policy evaluation, community development, and international disability rights. He has served as a Lecturer in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley, an Adjunct Professor in the Comparative Disability Policy Program at American University’s School for International Service, and as the International Research Fellow at the World Institute on Disability.
He has worked with the U.S. Department of the Treasury, World Bank, United Nations, UNESCO, UNICEF, and National Advisory Committees. Since 2003, Dr. Pineda has headed the World Enabled Initiative, a global research and educational initiative focused on improving employment and participation outcomes for youth with disabilities. He is also a founding member of the National Disability History Consortium and is the principal researcher on the It’s Our Story: Oral History Project.
Dr. Pineda holds a Ph.D. from the Luskin School for Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles and a Master’s in City and Regional Planning, a BA in Political Economy, and a BS in Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of “The Capability Model of Disability: Assessing the Success of UAE Federal Law No. 29 of 2006 in the Emirate of Dubai” and “It’s About Ability: An explanation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.” He was the recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) innovative research grant, a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, the Thomas Jefferson Award, the Tom Clausen Fellowship for Business and Policy, and the AAPD Paul G. Hearne Leadership Award.
2011
Courtney Bonam
Dr. Courtney Bonam is a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Public Policy School at the University of California Berkeley and is a research affiliate of San Francisco State University's Wangari Maathai Center for Sustainable Cities and Schools. Trained as a social psychologist, her research focuses on stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination; environmental justice; racial disparities in access to high quality physical space; as well as the experiences and perceptions of multiracial people. Courtney is a graduate of Stanford University. During her time there, she published research focusing on multiracial individuals' views of race as a social construct, as well as how this view can afford them resilience in potentially challenging social situations. Courtney's dissertation titled Devaluing Black Space: Black Locations as Targets of Housing and Environmental Discrimination used experimental methods to reveal context-focused stereotypes about Black Americans. These stereotypes are comprised of a strong association between Black Americans and negative, severely degraded physical space. This work provided evidence that individuals are more likely to regard the same physical space as lower quality, when it is occupied by Black (vs. White) people. Participants then treated Black physical space accordingly, for example, by being more willing to place a chemical plant in a majority Black (vs. White) neighborhood. Courtney continues to investigate the nature of context-focused stereotyping and its potential role in perpetuating racial disparities in exposure to pollution, health, wealth, and access to educational resources.
Courtney has been the recipient of the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship, Stanford University's Diversifying Academia Recruiting Excellence Fellowship for advanced PhD candidates, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues Grants-In-Aid research award, as well as the American Psychological Association Dissertation research award. She also received the Stanford University Lyman Award for University Service, highlighting her efforts to enhance graduate and faculty diversity while at Stanford. Please visit Courtney's website to view her CV, publications, and more information about her research and teaching.
Nyeema Harris
Nyeema Harris began in 2012 as a Chancellor’s and National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. She strives to be a global, relevant scientist and promotes an atmosphere of inquiry, inclusion, and innovation. As a community ecologist, she is broadly interested in how perturbations such as climate change, species extirpations, or land-use modifications alter biotic interactions across space. Her postdoctoral research is exploring trophic cascades in West Africa, encompassing studies on occupancy patterns of mammalian carnivores and spatial variation in host-parasite networks.
Nyeema received a BS from Virginia Tech in Wildlife Science. She studied demography and predation patterns on ungulates at University of Montana for her MS in Wildlife Biology. She completed her PhD in Wildlife, Fisheries, and Conservation Biology at North Carolina State University in 2011 studying the ecological and public health implications of species loss. Recent publications from her doctoral work include Ecology Letters, Diversity and Distributions, and an Annual Review in Ecology, Evolution and Systematics manuscript on coextinction. In 2010, she was named the Emerging Conservation Leader from the Philadelphia Zoo. She is committed to disseminating science widely from elementary schools to international conferences. She is enthusiastic about building multi-disciplinary, multi-cultural teams to tackle conservation and ecological conundrums while promoting scholarship and discovery. She remains dedicated to enhancing ownership of our natural environment in hopes of achieving a professional community that reflects the diversity in our societies.
Desiré Whitmore
Desiré Whitmore is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently researching electron dynamics of semiconducting systems at attosecond timescales in the laboratories of Stephen Leone and Daniel Neumark. She is a graduate of the Chemical and Material Physics program in the Physical Chemistry Department at the University of California, Irvine, where her dissertation work was concerned with nonlinear optics, and its application to both microscopy and spectroscopy. Her experience is mostly focused in the engineering aspect, such as design, improvement, and implementation of nonlinear optical systems. In the future, she would like to focus her research on photon entanglement in nonlinear optical systems.
Desiré worked with the Center for Applied Competitive Technologies (CACT) to plan, organize, and teach their Introduction to Optics course in 2007. When finished with the course at CACT, she came to be a member of the advisory committee of the UC Irvine Extension Optical Engineering & Instrument Design Program, where she helps to plan the courses and find appropriate teachers for the program courses. She has also served as a teaching assistant in several undergraduate- and graduate- level Chemistry courses at UC Irvine.
During her PhD work, she received funding from the AGEP Competitive Edge Fellowship, the GAAN fellowship, the NSF Graduate Researcher Fellowship, and the Presidential Dissertation Year Fellowship. She is the former President and Outreach Chair of the Optical Society of America (OSA) student chapter, and was also a member of the Advisory Council for Diversity at UC Irvine.
2010
Angela Marino
Dr. Angela Marino is a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley working in the areas of theatre and performance, political movements and popular fiesta in the Americas. She is a graduate of New York University and is currently working on a book project that documents and theoretically analyzes the role of the devil in popular fiesta in Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Peru and the United States. Her dissertation research focused on the intersection of performance and politics in the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela (1999–2008).
She has worked in the theater as an actor, director, translator and festival organizer.
2009
Eduardo Contreras
Eduardo Contreras is an United States historian, with specializations in U.S. Latino History, urban history, and the history of gender and sexuality. He holds a Ph.D. and A.M. in History from The University of Chicago and an A.B. in History from Amherst College. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Latinos in the Liberal City: Politics and Community in Postwar San Francisco. The study examines the evolution and diversity of Latina and Latino politics in San Francisco from the 1940s to the 1970s. Prior to his appointment as a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow, he served as Assistant Professor at the University of Houston. His teaching portfolio includes courses such as The United States since 1877, Comparative Latino Histories, Postwar Society and Culture, and the History of Sexuality.
Courtney J. Martin
Courtney J. Martin is completing a dissertation in the History of Art department at Yale University entitled, Cyclones in the Metropole: British Artists 1968-1989. Her dissertation examines the confluence of civic disruption, immigration, and new forms of object making in post-War Britain. She is interested in the ways in which 20th century British art has both highly idealized international and regional components. In addition to her scholarly research, Courtney has curated several exhibitions, including Poison America: Sharon Gilbert’s Bookworks at the Arts of the Book Collection, Yale University and C-Series: Artists’ Books and Collective Action, in New York at the Nathan Cummings Foundation. She has also contributed to exhibition catalogues. These include, “They Will Come and They Will Go,” Exhuming Gluttony with Wangechi Mutu (forthcoming 2009); “Sight Was Regulated, Shapes Were Continually Re-fashioned”: Alia Syed’s Eating Grass at the Biennale of Sydney (2006); and “The Re-selection of Ancestors: Abstraction in the Second Generation,” in Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964–1980, the Studio Museum in Harlem (2006). Currently, she is a predoctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, California. In 2007, she was a Henry Moore Institute Research Fellow. Prior to her arrival at Yale, she was the Interim Head Curator at the Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum and worked in the media, arts, and culture unit of the Ford Foundation in New York on an international arts portfolio. She has served as a consultant for Ford in the areas of arts education and cultural re-organization in the Gulf region. Her criticism has appeared in Art Asia Pacific, Art Papers, Contemporary, Flashart, Frieze and NKA. She is a regular contributor to Artforum.com.
Jun Sunseri
Dr. Kojun “Jun” Ueno Sunseri received his Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineering and his Bachelors of the Arts in Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles. After service with the U.S. Peace Corps and work with a small engineering firm, Dr. Sunseri went on to receive his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2009. His dissertation, ““Nowhere to Run, Everywhere to Hide: Multi-scalar identity practices at Casitas Viejas,” used detailed archaeological analyses of foodways and cultural landscape creation to explore hidden dimensions of situational identity practices on the frontier of Spanish Colonial New Mexico.
Dr. Sunseri’s research in historical archaeology includes complementary lines of evidence of varied types and spatial scales. These include analysis of archaeological ceramic and faunal assemblages related to domestic foodways and GIS analysis of remote sensing, survey, and excavation data to reveal tactical, engineering, and ritual patterning of cultural landscapes. By placing these suites of data in dialogue with each other, he seeks more robust explanations of the ways that communities expressed various aspects of their identities in different contexts and scales of social performance. Primary to such research is the study of systems of cross-cultural contact and the way they operate in structuring and mitigating social and ethnic boundaries during the proto-historic and colonial periods. Related to these research foci are the relationships between colonization and the historical transformation of indigenous landscape, foodways, and identity. As an archaeologist, he is especially interested in the potential for examining these issues through the analysis of material culture and technology.
In addition, Dr. Sunseri’s research projects are focused on multidimensional processes that are both archaeological and contemporary, necessitating his collaboration with living communities in the narrative building process. He has conducted research in collaboration with local community members and agencies in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico. Dr. Sunseri’s commitments to the communities who trace their heritage to his dissertation research site have facilitated partnerships with local residents and teachers interested in a revival of Indo-Hispano ethnohistory in local curriculum and land management endeavors.
2008
Bethany Lyles Goldblum
Clare Boothe Luce Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr. Bethany Lyles Goldblum completed her doctoral degree with perfect marks in the Department of Nuclear Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled "Absolute and Relative Surrogate Measurements of the 236U(n,f) Cross Section as a Probe of Angular Momentum Effects" investigated the limitations of the Surrogate Method, a technique for indirect determination of neutron-induced reaction cross sections on radioactive nuclei. Dr. Goldblum’s research interests are in the area of applied nuclear physics, with current emphasis on nuclear data needs for homeland security and Generation IV nuclear energy systems as well as active interrogation methods for nuclear materials control and accountability. She maintains collaborations with researchers in the Physical Sciences Directorate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Nuclear Science Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Department of Physics at the University of Oslo, Norway.
Dr. Goldblum’s fellowship is supported by a generous grant from the Clare Boothe Luce Program of the Luce Foundation. Dr. Goldblum has received numerous fellowships and grants including the American Association of University Women Selected Professions Dissertation Fellowship, the Phi Kappa Phi Graduate Fellowship and the Department of Energy Nuclear Engineering Fellowship, among others. As a National Science Foundation East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes Grant Recipient, she traveled to Canberra, Australia to collaborate with researchers in the Department of Nuclear Physics at the Australian National University. She has served as a teaching assistant to undergraduates in nuclear physics, radiation detection and nuclear instrumentation and as a lecturer in radiation biophysics and dosimetry.
In addition to Goldblum’s scientific pursuits, she maintains a functioning interest in nuclear energy and weapons policy. She held the National Science Foundation Public Policy and Nuclear Threats Fellowship, was a Project on Nuclear Issues Scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a member of the United States delegation to the China-India-United States Workshop on Science, Technology and Innovation Policy in Bangalore, India. Goldblum organized the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation’s 2007 Emerging Nuclear Threats Conference held in Washington, D.C. and coauthored a proposal outlining a novel means for deterring a nuclear North Korea, which was presented on Capitol Hill.
Ellen Huang
Dr. Ellen Huang’s research considers the intersections among modernity, aesthetics, and subject formation as they are related to the historiography of Chinese art and canon formation. Using textual and visual sources, her work focuses on the production and dissemination of knowledge about “china” (porcelain) from China during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth-centuries. She is interested in both the material and social aspects of ceramic aesthetics and the global processes by which the boundaries of Chinese art history were formed. Within the field of East Asian Studies, her project on ceramics investigates the porosity of regional, imperial, and national constructs in the modern period. In art history, she is interested in exploring the negotiation between material and visual aspects of an art object at specific historical contexts. In the future, she hopes to apply these research interests and findings to a theoretical study of the significance of art and aesthetics in the development of histories of ornament and decoration in the non-West.
2005
Marlon Bailey
Marlon M. Bailey is a UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and Women’s Studies. In the fall of 2007, Dr. Bailey will be an assistant professor of Gender Studies and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Marlon’s article, “They Want us Sick: Diaspora, Displacement, Ballroom Culture and HIV/AIDS Intravention,” will appear in the forthcoming collection entitled, African Diaspora: Race, Citizenship, and Modern Subjectivities, Edited by Percy C. Hintzen, Jean Muteba Rahier, & Felipè Smith.
Marlon has been a professional actor and director for more than ten years. He has performed in and directed professional productions in D.C., Minneapolis/St. Paul, Louisville, San Francisco, Detroit, and Accra, Ghana, West Africa. Most recently, he starred as Boy Willie in the Plowshares Theatre and the Boars Head Theatre joint production of August Wilson’s Piano Lesson in MI. One of the highlight’s of Marlon’s acting career was when he performed in “for colored boys who have considered s-curls when the hot comb was enuf,” at the Theatre Rhinoceros in San Francisco. He has also directed several productions such as Mud, River, Stone at the Actor’s Guild of Lexington and “Desert Dreams” at the National Theatre of Ghana.
Marlon has focused much of his scholarly and artistic endeavors on social justice issues particularly on racial, gender, and sexual equity. For example, Marlon has worked as a staff member and a consultant for HIV/AIDS prevention organizations such as AIDS Project East Bay in Oakland CA., the Men of Color Motivational Group Inc. and Empowerment Detroit in Michigan.
David Colón
David’s teaching and research interests include contemporary fiction, poetics, rhetoric, and writing. He completed his Ph.D. in English at Stanford University; his dissertation, Embodying the Ideogram: Orientalism in Modernist Poetry (UMI, 2004), examines the influence of Chinese writing and sinology on innovations in Western poetic forms through the early to mid-twentieth century. His first novel manuscript, And Ever Shall Be – a romance set in a world where humanity is faced with the threat of extinction – is in its latter stages of revision. He is at work on a second novel, November, about a Puerto Rican English professor, mistaken for an Anglo, who is kidnapped by Puerto Rican Nationalists. A second-year Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, David has received grants from the Mellon Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation; was a scholar-in-residence at the Stanford Humanities Center and Stanford’s El Centro Chicano; and served as a Teaching Fellow in Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric prior to coming to Berkeley in the fall of 2005. On a personal note, David is happily married, is the proud father of the two most adorable girls you could ever meet in your life, and can’t wait to move out of the ghetto.
David is grateful for the opportunity to be a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow.
Lisa Dyson
Dr. Lisa Dyson is an exceptionally talented string theorist who has worked extensively with faculty at Stanford (where she was an exchange scholar) as well as at MIT. She is interested in the study of singularities, Closed Time-like Curves (the technical term for “time-travel”) and possible applications of string theory in cosmology. She has already made important contributions to string theory, and her single-author paper “Chronology Protection in String Theory” opened a new direction of research. Her paper described an original way to approach the question of “time travel” in string theory.
Dr. Dyson will be working with the Theoretical Physics Group and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab enthusiastically welcome Lisa as a participating guest in their joint theory group.
Dr. Dyson plans to continue exploring the fascinating ways that string theory serves as a correction to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. She is currently working on generalizations of her previous result on Chronology Protection and exploring the connections between her result and the work of Dr. Gimon and Prof. Horava. She plans to expand her research to include a broader class of solutions to General Relativity that receive corrections from string theory. She will also continue to explore how singular geometries are resolved and study fundamental aspects of cosmology. Dr. Dyson is excited about the opportunity to collaborate on these and other topics in String Theory with the leading researchers in the Theoretical Physics Group and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
Candace Johnson
Soprano Candace Johnson received her Doctorate of Musical Arts (March 2006) in voice performance at the University of Michigan, where she studied with world-renowned opera singer Shirley Verrett. She now holds a Chancellor's postdoctoral fellowship in the department of musicat the University of California, Berkeley. Her research analyzes the interaction of text, melody, and harmony in African-American solo song literature, with special emphasis on the works of Adolphus Hailstork. Passionate about sharing her knowledge with youth, Candace is on the voice faculty of the University's community outreach program, The Young Musician's Program
Candace has sung the lead soprano roles in Puccini's Suor Angelica, The Medium by Menotti, and Mozart'sBastien and Bastienne. She is also a recitalist and concert artist who was a finalist in the National Leontyne Price Competition and previously held the title of Ms. Black Tennessee for two years.
Her silvery, warm lyric-coloratura voice and extraordinary interpretive skills make her the consummate singing actor who brings audiences a tangible, moving experience. Composer Adolphus Hailstork hails her performance of his works as "the best interpretation of his songs he ever encountered." Candace will perform his works and more on a noonday concert at Hertz Hall on Wednesday, September 20th, 2006.
Sheryl Mebane
Sheryl Mebane earned her doctorate in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley. Her dissertation included work in simulating ultra fast solution dynamics of inorganic compounds using molecular dynamics as well as a project in chemistry education that chronicled and analyzed the impact of heterogeneous classes on the achievement of African American chemistry students in an inner city school.
Her current research project centers around the Chemistry Literacy Project, which supports the creation of a network of educators, researchers and community groups. The project and network synthesize advancements from three fields to design and pilot extracurricular and curricular environmental chemistry education programs that increase student understanding, inform action, and provide access to knowledge for underserved communities.
Derek Murray
Dr. Murray’s research considers the interrelatedness of capitalism, subject formation, and spectatorship—as related to African-American art production and its historiography. Simultaneously, this study unpacks the ritualized transmutation of the black body into a commoditized and ‘brandable’ symbolic in American artistic practice. Utilizing Hegelian and Lacanian models, this project explores the ‘negative ecstasy’ associated with the consumption of spectacles that are grounded in racial fetishism—exploring its far-reaching impact on black artists. Canonical investigations into the reification of stereotypes and the complexities of cultural identification provide the groundwork to further engage identity construction within African Diaspora art and visual culture. Of special interest is discerning whether the ascription and ‘enacting’ of racial identity—as a gesture of self-articulation—has potential ill effects if it becomes merely a ‘performance of alterity’ for the global art market. Along this trajectory, his work is concerned with unraveling how the localizing of blackness (as visual spectacle) influences—if not defines—the production and historiography of African-American art from the 1920s to the present.
Dr. Murray’s dissertation is entitled, “Negative Jouissance: The Spectacle of Racial Fetishism in the History of African-American Art.” He received his MA (2003) and PhD (2004) from Cornell University’s Department of History of Art