Virtual Office Hours:
M-F, 10-11 am
Dani Stephenson
Arts & Humanities
Dani Stephenson (she/her) is a third-year PhD student in Comparative Literature. Her research interests involve questions of abolition and solidarity, exploring works of surrealist literature and music throughout the Black diaspora. She obtained her B.A. in French and Italian with a concentration in Jazz Studies at Princeton University in 2020 and joined Berkeley’s Comparative Literature Department in the fall of 2021.
Virtual Office Hours:
M 10-11:30 am,
T 2:30-4 pm
Joni Landeros-Cisneros
Social Sciences
My name is Joni (pronouns: he/him/his) and I am a first-generation scholar in the Critical Studies of Race, Class, and Gender in the Ph.D. program in the Education department. I was born in La Piedad, Michoacán, and was raised in Sioux City, Iowa. I completed a B.S. in anthropology and an MA in anthropology from Iowa State University where I was a Ronald E. McNair scholar. My research interests include whiteness studies, asymmetrical and targeted policing in K-12 and higher education, abolition studies, and the prison-industrial complex (school-prison-industrialized labor nexus). I have research experience in biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. For my doctoral studies, I am inquiring how police humanitarianism, a domestic counterinsurgency program, is upheld and reproduced for mental health and drug education initiatives in educational institutions. Being a target of asymmetrical criminalization has provided me an entry to imagine alternative solutions beyond educational reform and disrupt the hyper-criminalization of ethno-racially marginalized communities. My commitment to undoing these systems and destabilizing power relations is evidenced by my commitment to mentorship and my pursuit of a Ph.D. in education with a focus on critical studies. I intend to join the professoriate and dedicate my work to transformational research that has the power to reshape and make higher education accessible to historically marginalized students while disrupting the mechanisms that uphold targeted criminalization. In my free time, I enjoy road cycling, fútbol, hiking, hanging with friends, listening to corridos and banda, and watching competitive cooking tv shows.
Office Hours:
T,Th 3:30-5:30 pm
Virtual & 2422 Dwinelle
Yasemin’s Zoom Link
Yasemin Kiriscioglu
Math & Physical Sciences
Yasemin Kiriscioglu (she/her) is a 4th year PhD student in Physics. Her research is centered around the question of how life begins in living organisms, and how we can model this physically. To answer this question, she studies gene regulatory networks in developing organisms from a thermodynamic point of view, and uses both experimental and theoretical methods. She started research in soft condensed matter and biophysics as an undergraduate student, and pursued a degree in Physics and Mathematics from Harvard University. In her free time, she enjoys hiking in Pacifica and playing tennis with her cohort!
Office Hours:
MThF 5-6:30 pm
T 1:30-3 pm
Virtual & 2422 Dwinelle
Juliana’s Zoom Link
Juliana Lee
Biological Sciences
Juliana J. Lee (she/her) is a first-year Ph.D. student in Molecular and Cell Biology. Her current research interests include (epi)genetics, immunology, and method development. During her undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto, she developed a keen interest in immunology, which later expanded to genetics while researching malaria using CRISPR-Cas9 screens at the University of Oxford, where she earned her Master’s by Research degree. Combining her interests in immunology and genetics, she worked at Harvard University for the Immunological Genome consortium (www.immgen.org). There, she produced and analyzed (epi)genetic data from various immune cells using CUT&RUN, ATACseq, and RNAseq. Simultaneously, she collaborated with EpiCypher to develop a specialized method of CUT&RUN. In her free time, she enjoys reading, hiking, and photography.