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...
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...
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-...
Reiley Reed, MPH, MSW (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in Social Welfare at UC Berkeley. She studies reproductive health equity and power dynamics in health care and social services. Reiley is currently a T32 National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism predoctoral fellow with the Alcohol Research Group, a graduate student researcher at the Sexual Health and Reproductive Equity Program at UC Berkeley, and an instructor at Berkeley City College.
In her mixed methods dissertation research, Reiley is exploring social worker experiences with and...
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.
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,...
