Jessie Harney was a PhD candidate and Graduate Student Researcher at the Goldman School of Public Policy. Her research interests are in criminal justice system reform with a specific focus on mental health and improving outcomes for those whose lives are impacted by the carceral system. She holds degrees in Psychology (BS) from Truman State University, Biostatistics (MS) from Washington University in St. Louis, and Public Policy (MPP) from the University of California, Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy.
Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Fellow
Social Welfare, UC Berkeley
Luyi Jian is currently a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare. Her research is situated within the juvenile and criminal legal systems, focusing on intervention strategies at the individual level and policy evaluation at the systemic level. Her dissertation explores a strength-based, innovative intervention that aims to translate the largely abstract Positive Youth Justice paradigm into real application. Specifically, she explores the extent to which justice-involved youth develop a prosocial identity or sense of self, and tests the conditions under...
Benjamin Lacar studied biochemistry at UCLA and earned his Ph.D. in neuroscience from Yale University. His postdoctoral research at the Salk Institute was the first to report transcriptomes of activated single-neurons. He subsequently joined Fluidigm to help develop genomics applications. In his initial role as a product applications scientist, he analyzed data for marketing, educated staff and customers, and supported external collaborations across a variety of research domains. He then created analysis pipelines to facilitate method development as a bioinformatics scientist. Seeking to...
Ivana Malenica is a Ph.D. student in the Biostatistics Division working with Mark van der Laan. She earned her Master’s in Biostatistics and Bachelor’s in Mathematics, and spent a year working as a Freeport-McMoRan research fellow in Data Science and Bioinformatics at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen). Some of her prior work centers around mathematical modeling and Bayesian models for allele specific expression. Very broadly, her research interests span non/...
Epidemiology & Biostatistics, Public Health, UC Berkeley
Krista Neumann is a PhD student in Epidemiology at Berkeley’s School of Public Health. Her goal is to apply her training in Mathematics to social epidemiological questions focused on reducing health disparities. Neumann’s current research interests aim to answer the causal question: which policies, programs and interventions most successfully reduce systematically embedded barriers to health for marginalized and low-income communities. She’s particularly interested in food and nutrition insecurity as a specific outcome, as well as ways to overcome obstacles which prevent evidence from...
Valentín "Val" Sierra is a PhD student at Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare with a designated emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies. Their clinical and research agendas focus on eliminating mental health disparities, particularly suicide and depression, for urban Native American young people through culturally grounded practices and interventions. Sierra is an Associate Clinical Social Worker and an active member of the California Yaqui (Yoeme) Indian community. They hold a MSW from Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare and a BA in Native American Studies, with highest honors, from...
Elizabeth Smith is a biophysicist and data scientist who is passionate about using data and algorithms to improve lives and make work more efficient. She spent the past five years at a geospatial analytics startup where she applied artificial intelligence / machine learning to build software products from terabytes of satellite imagery. Her postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF and the Advanced Light Source focused on developing novel methods to image, reconstruct, co-align and analyze features within three-dimensional tomographic reconstructions. Dr. Smith has a PhD in biophysics from the...
Former BIDS Data Science Fellow Sara Stoudt is currently an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Bucknell University. At UC Berkeley, she was a PhD student in Statistics advised by Professors Will Fithian and Perry de Valpine. Her research interests included ecological applications of statistics and assessing the identifiability and robustness of inference under model misspecification in species distribution models. She was also involved in teaching writing for statistics with Professor Deborah Nolan. Prior to being a BIDS Fellow, Sara was supported by a...
Mahader Tamene is a PhD student in the Division of Epidemiology at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health. A public health scholar dedicated to facilitating health and justice for underserved populations globally, her research focuses on maternal and child mental health disparities, particularly community-based interventions that address the structural forces driving these disparities. Tamene has worked in community health education, health research, program implementation and evaluation both domestically and abroad. She holds an MSc in global health and population from Harvard T.H....
