Ryan Karnoski (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate in Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. Ryan’s research examines how child welfare systems recognize and respond to the identities and needs of transgender and gender-diverse youth. Drawing on experience as a licensed clinical social worker and mental health provider, his work bridges practice and policy to illuminate how documentation, placement decisions, and professional beliefs shape the care experiences of system-involved youth.
His mixed-methods dissertation investigates how California...
Sofia Guo(she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Social Welfare. She studies public child welfare workforce issues from an interdisciplinary perspective by quantifying wage affordability for social workers and linking pay data with union contract information to better understand drivers of worker turnover among other related challenges. Currently, Sofia is a graduate student researcher at the California Child Welfare Indicators Project; she is also a fellow at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (Computational Social Science Training...
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...
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.
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...
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...
