Sergio Mendez
Current Bio: After graduation, Sergio worked at a company that specialized in legal translations as an assistant project manager. He took some time off work to study for the law school admission test. Sergio later took a job at a nonprofit organization called GRIP Training Institute as an operations assistant. He hopes to retake the law school acceptance exam soon. Haas Scholars Project: Metafiction, or fiction that is aware of its own artificiality, is often dismissed as gimmicky postmodern narrative pyrotechnicsa narratological gamble for any writer wishing to be taken […]
Shelby Mack
Black girls are disproportionately impacted by school discipline policies and practices that render them vulnerable to abuse, exploitation and dehumanization. It has been shown in multiple studies that Black girls who are suspended or expelled are more likely to become incarcerated later. Shelby Macks research seeks to identify factors such as school discipline, criminalization and gender violence in order to understand how enrichment programs can disrupt the school to prison pipeline epidemic among Black girls in Oakland, CA. Her research will employ in-depth interviewing, purposive sampling and non-participant observation of […]
Diana Lutfi
Why is causing harm ethically justifiable? Diana has always been perplexed that a rational individual would compromise his/her bodily comfort in order to prolong life and create a culture where other people are forced to do the same for the sake of health. Although patient autonomy is legally protected in western healthcare institutions, individuals that are considered minors are not afforded these same autonomy rights. They are, instead, given rights of protection of best interest. This, however, can often create a dilemma when healthcare providers and legal guardians disagree about […]
Heather Kornblum
Income inequality is associated with deleterious economic, social, and health outcomes. These negative effects disproportionately affect the poor, but surface across all strata of society. Regulatory focus being promotion or prevention focused is the psychological mechanism that may account for these effects. Promotion focus involves living life through a lens of what one stands to gain, while prevention focus entails living life through a lens of what one stands to lose. Heather will examine income inequalitys effect on regulatory focus, shedding light on one psychological mechanism underlying the negative effects […]
Albert Kim
It is not yet known what causes autism spectrum disorder (ASD) on a molecular level, but recently, 65 ASD risk genes have been identified by a lab at UCSF. Albert is focusing on one of these genes, called Neurexin 1. He will be using CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing to knock out Nrxn1 in Xenopus tropicalis frogs and observing the phenotypic effects, such as increases and reductions in cell proliferation and differentiation as well as changes in regulation of other neural genes. Alberts goal is to illuminate the roles of this gene […]
Susan Kim
As the historic prison boom of the past thirty years comes to a halt in California, a nascent jailr boom has snuck onto the scene. Forty out of fifty-eight counties in California are in various stages of building or renovating jails, the most pronounced characteristic among these new jail projects being their emphasis on mental health treatment. Susan will conduct secondary and archival research, interviews with various stakeholders, and observation of political events concerning jail expansion and mental health to investigate the political, economic, and social forces facilitating the newest […]
Mark Johnson
Throughout the 1900s Berkeley Anthropologists documented the ethnographic information of many Native Californian tribes for fear that their lifeways and languages were soon to become extinct in the wake of the burgeoning United States. The Bancroft Library is now steward of these ethnographic collections. While the public institution is responsible to make the collections available to all without bias, one Native Californian community has protested that open access to these collections leaves their community vulnerable to multiple dangers such as misrepresentation in academic articles and potential looting of the sacred […]
Adrián García Hernández
Rural areas compose 86% of Mexicos territory and account for 36% of the population while rural GDP per capita ranges between 27% and 43% of the national average. To address this urban/rural developmental divide, the Secretariat of Tourism created the Programa Pueblos Mgicos (PPM). Its goal was to raise local levels of wellbeing by promoting economic development through tourism. By carrying out a sense of community survey, collecting socioeconomic data, and interviewing residents and town officials, Adrin will explore whether the PPM has resulted in the abatement or aggravation of […]
Nicholas Eskow
In 1873, more than 100 Buffalo Soldiers at Fort Stockton, Texas signed a petition requesting formal censure of the post surgeon for his racist refusal to treat a sick and dying man. The officers responded by putting the soldiers on trial for mutiny. Nicks research will look at how these soldiers, most of whom were born into enslavement, came to understand and express their rights as United States citizens. This research will combine primary documentary sources, housed at the National Archives and Fort Stockton, with secondary literature on African American […]
Sara Ellis
All too often, patients in psychiatric hospitals are involved in violent incidents with other patients and hospital staff. These incidents incur significant economic, social and human costs. Although most research has focused on identifying patient characteristics that contribute to violence (e.g., young age, past violence), there is growing recognition that rates of violence can vary tremendously based on the environment. Sara will be using an instrument, PRISM (Promoting Risk Intervention by Situational Management), to examine how environmental factors contribute to variation in rates of institutional violence across units at Napa […]