Melissa Granville, LLMSW, ASW (she/her) is a second-year PhD student in Social Welfare. Her scholarly interests center on digital mental health, health equity, and culturally responsive behavioral health interventions. Melissa is especially interested in the intersection of community-based, participatory, and technology-enabled approaches to mental health care, with a focus on making care more accessible, relevant, and responsive to communities that have historically faced barriers within traditional health systems. She has a particular interest in Afro-diasporic–...
Aldazia Green(she/her) is a fourth-year Ph.D. student at the School of Social Welfare. Her research examines the racial fairness of algorithmic risk assessment tools utilized in the criminal justice system. Through her commitment to both research and practice, she has gained experience in policy advocacy, program implementation, and computational analysis. As an emerging quantitative and critical scholar, Aldazia strives to improve mental health treatment and criminal justice policy in the United States. As an emerging quantitative and critical scholar,...
Anissa Hall (she/her) is a 3rd-year MSW/PhD student (MSW received May 2026) interested in exploring the ways in which societal forces operate in potentially traumatizing ways for racialized communities, with a particular focus on historical (and ongoing) traumatization across the African American community. Anissa’s interests also encompass the preservation and disruption of sociocultural, spiritual and physical connections between African and Afro-Diasporic communities. She is intrinsically motivated by a desire to leverage theoretical frameworks within social...
Nereida Heller (she/her) is a fourth-year MSW/PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare. Her research centers on poverty governance, public health equity, and substance use policy, with a particular focus on how welfare and behavioral health systems shape outcomes for marginalized populations. Before beginning her doctoral studies, Nereida worked on homelessness and welfare policy at the San Francisco Human Services Agency and served as Senior Data and Evaluation Analyst at the Office of Early Care and Education. She has also held research and...
Margaret Lee (she/her) is a PhD student in Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies how community organizations respond to the social and emotional needs of their communities, with a particular focus on immigrant communities and the workers who serve them. She is interested in how care, culture, emotion, and relationships shape practice, and how organizations interpret and transform formal social welfare mandates into culturally grounded and meaningful forms of support.
Drawing on ten years of experience across community...
Alejandro Nuñez (he/him) is a current doctoral student in the School of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley. His research focuses primarily on youth well-being and education policy, specifically the area of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and youth development. Currently, he is developing a new conceptual framework that reframes SEL as social, emotional, and political. It draws on political economy, racial capitalism, and structural analysis. This framework provides long-term focus to the structural conditions that are often left unaddressed by both systemic and...
Marymar Vacio Lazalde, MPH (she/her/ella) is a doctoral student in the School of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley. Proudly identifying as first-generation, she earned her BAs in Public Health Policy and International Studies from UC Irvine and her Master of Public Health from Brown University. Prior to her Master's program, Marymar was a Project Assistant at the University of Southern California where she supported two NIH-funded projects focusing on health disparities affecting Latine communities. At Brown, she was a Health Equity Scholar and research assistant that...
Giovanni Velasco Morales (he/him) is a doctoral student at the UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare. His research interests center on the delivery and access of social welfare services for people experiencing homelessness.
Giovanni's path to doctoral studies spans multiple disciplines. He earned a B.A. in Theatre from UC San Diego (2008) and worked with local and regional companies that sought to make a social impact by amplifying the voices and stories within the community. Later, he worked as a special education teacher developing individualized education...
Brittany Vickers, LCSW, is a PhD student in Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, she spent seven years at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland, where she worked as a clinician and clinical supervisor serving children, adolescents, and families. Her professional experience includes supervising graduate-level trainees and developing and facilitating training on culturally responsive clinical practice, child welfare, attachment, and trauma-informed care. She also maintains a small private practice.
Mo'e Yaisikana (he/him) is a member of Cou (Indigenous Taiwanese) and a doctoral student at the School of Social Welfare. His intellectual interests concern the interplay between democratic politics and the effectiveness of public care for older adults through a global comparative lens, particularly how the older population participates in public deliberation and actualizes their citizenship. He examines the construction and hindrance of care policies and the service delivery system, aiming to unravel a comprehensive, systematic, intersecting dynamic form of power...
