Neena Albarus(she/her) is a doctoral student in the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research experience spans structural violence, community development, and the intersections of policy and public health in Jamaica and the Caribbean. Her dissertation explores interventions addressing the commercial sexual exploitation of children in Jamaica. Neena is committed to using data to advance social interventions across the Caribbean and other underrepresented regions.
Taylor Brown(he/him) is a PhD Candidate in Social Welfare and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. He studies how welfare states mediate climate adaptation and inequality, theorizing ecosocial policy—the overlap of welfare and environmental states. His research bridges social science and the humanities, using econometrics, computational social science, and critical text analysis. He is a Research Associate and Adjunct Professor with Tulane University’s CEDR/DRLA, a Senior Data Science Fellow at the UC Berkeley Social Science Data Lab, involved in the Environmental...
Alagia Justice Cirolia(she/they) is a PhD student who received both their BA in Cognitive Science with High Honors (‘17) and MSW (‘23) from UC Berkeley. Alagia is a proud multi-racial, first-generation scholar from Oceanside, CA, who became motivated by their own academic experiences to study school-based mental health services and their impact on under-resourced communities. Alagia is committed to transforming educational systems in order to promote youth mental health and wellbeing and foster belonging among marginalized students.
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 2nd-year MSW/PhD student (MSW expected 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 and physical connections between African and Afro-Diasporic communities. Anissa received her undergraduate degree from Rice University (May 2024), where she majored in Sociology...
Nereida Heller (she/her) is a third-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 CalWORKs policy at the San Francisco Human Services Agency, served as Senior Data and Evaluation Analyst at the Office of Early Care and Education, and worked in the San Francisco Mayor’s...
Margaret Lee(she/her) is a PhD student in Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines immigrant-serving community-based organizations as social welfare innovators, focusing on how care, emotion, culture, and policy intersect in everyday practice. Using qualitative and mixed-methods approaches, she studies how institutional logics and emotional labor shape service delivery and workforce wellbeing—particularly within Southeast Asian and other marginalized communities—and how community organizations translate state programs into...
Alejandro Nuñez(he/him) is a Mexican American Ph.D. student in Social Welfare at UC Berkeley. Having grown up between Mexico and Salinas, CA, he is dedicated to advancing culturally responsive social emotional learning (SEL) and school-based mental health supports that uplift Latiné and Spanish-speaking students and families. Alejandro collaborates closely with educators and education leaders to investigate how implementation strategies and education policy shape access to mental health wellness supports, with a focus on creating more equitable and caring...
Orlando Parrales (he/him) is a Ph.D. student in the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) in New York and Texas. He earned his Bachelor of Social Work from Texas Tech University and his Master of Social Work from Columbia University. Before coming to Berkeley, he worked for several years as a social worker with a homeless outreach team in New York City, providing case management services to individuals experiencing chronic homelessness and sleeping in the public transit system. Orlando’s research...
Laura Pathak is a PhD candidate (combined MSW/PhD program) whose research bridges ethics, technology, and social policy. Her work focuses on data privacy, ownership, and participatory approaches to AI governance, with particular attention to their implications for marginalized populations and social work practice and policy.
Prior to graduate study, Laura served as Program Director at a Berkeley-based community nonprofit supporting immigrant families, as Product Manager at a nonprofit healthcare technology startup developing mobile health interventions for low-...
