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...
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.
Tiffany Luo, MSW, PPSC(she/her) is a PhD Candidate in the School of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley. Tiffany is a social work educator, practitioner, and researcher. She has six years of teaching experience across the MSW, BASW, and high school levels, and she is passionate about employing inclusive teaching methods, embracing critical pedagogical approaches, and providing supportive mentorship to prepare social work students to deliver culturally responsive care to underserved populations. She received UC Berkeley’s Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award...
Leyi (Joy) Zhou(she/her) is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Social Welfare, with a Designated Emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies. She received her bachelor’s degree in Sociology from Tsinghua University in China and her MSW from the...
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-...
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...
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, 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 to help explain the...
