Graduate Fellows

Pia Deshpande

Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Fellow
Political Science, UC Berkeley

Pia Deshpande is a Political Science PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. She is broadly interested in race, political behavior, and social inequity in American Politics. So far, she has worked on projects examining white American reactions to demographic change, narrative techniques to reduce prejudice against different outgroups, and asymmetric political mobilization as a result of elite weaponization of language. She is starting new work on evictions leading to political disenfranchisement. Before starting at Berkeley, Pia worked as an academic researcher at the...

Benjamin Fields

Berkeley Computational Social Science Fellow
Sociology, UC Berkeley

Benjamin Fields is a PhD student in the sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley. A health-oriented social scientist, he wants to focus his research on a social understanding of diet and its relationship to well-being, looking beyond the physiological definition of food towards one that includes social, cultural, political, and economic considerations.

Peter Forberg

Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Fellow
Sociology, UC Berkeley

Peter Forberg is a PhD student in Sociology at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on the connections between digital technology, the administrative state, and political movements. In particular, he is interested in how political actors are using technology to reshape contemporary knowledge and enact their political visions. Prior to entering graduate school, Peter conducted independent research on the political conspiracy group QAnon. In future research, he hopes to combine the methods of computational data science with those of qualitative content analysis and participant observation....

Annette Gailliot

Berkeley Computational Social Science Fellow
Sociology, UC Berkeley

Annette Gailliot is a Sociology PhD student at UC Berkeley, with a specialization in Political Economy. Her research focuses on how technology is changing work-based inequalities and regulations. Combining historical and quantitative methods, she is particularly interested in understanding how barriers to social welfare access affect health outcomes. Prior to starting her PhD, she worked on The Shift Project at the Harvard Kennedy School, studying how unpredictable scheduling affects wellbeing and health for low-wage service sector workers. Gailliot holds dual Bachelors of Science in...

Taylor Galdi

Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Fellow
Berkeley Law School, UC Berkeley

Taylor Galdi is a JD/PhD student in Berkeley Law's Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program. Her research focuses on courts, social movements and social change, and the legal profession. Prior to starting her PhD, Taylor worked as a Mitigation Specialist at the Center for Community Alternatives and as a Lab Manager at the University of Michigan Law School. Taylor holds an MFA in Literary Nonfiction Writing from Eastern Washington University and a BA in Psychology from the University of Michigan.

Omair Gill

Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Fellow
Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley

Omair is a PhD student at the Goldman School of Public Policy. His current research focuses on the impacts of California’s Three-Strikes law and free prison communications. Prior to starting his PhD, Omair was a research associate at the California Policy Lab at UC Berkeley, where he worked on projects related to prison sentencing and criminal law. Omair holds a Master of Public Policy from the University of Chicago and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from UC Davis.

Aldazia Green

Berkeley Computational Social Science Fellow, Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Fellow
UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare

Aldazia Green is a PhD student at UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare. Her research interest centers on investigating the interactive effects of cognitive behavioral treatments and medications on psychiatric symptoms and the reduction of criminal behavior among justice-involved communities with severe mental illness. 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...

Kylee Hoffman

Berkeley Computational Social Science Fellow
Sociology, Demography, UC Berkeley

Kylee Hoffman is a PhD student in Sociology and Demography at UC Berkeley. Her research broadly focuses on neighborhood change, socioeconomic and historical causes of health inequality, and the effects of gentrification and displacement. One of her current projects looks at air pollution exposure differentials among internal migrants in the US across racial and socioeconomic groups. Another project focuses on cohort imprinting effects in seasonal influenza mortality. In future research, she is interested in leveraging computational methods to capture complex demographic trends in large-...

Andy Kim

Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Fellow
Biostatistics, UC Berkeley

As a graduate student in Biostatistics, I applied to CRELS to consider the ways in which statistical application to public health data is analogous and complementary to the ways we can consider data regarding criminal justice. For instance, one way I find statistics to be a powerful tool is how it can elucidate and ways that assumptions have been systematically built and enforced through erroneous, manipulative, and/or insidious ways of interpreting and communicating data.

As I enter the 4th year of my program, I've been studying methods to observe and describe data that don't...

Jonathan Landeros-Cisneros

Berkeley Computational Research for Equity in the Legal System Fellow
Education, Critical Studies UC Berkeley

Joni Landeros-Cisneros is a Ph.D. student in Education at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds a Master of Anthropology and a BS in Anthropology from Iowa State University. Additionally, he has contributed to academia by instructing courses with critical and decolonial frameworks in the fields of education and Spanish language learning. His research portfolio spans interdisciplinary quantitative and qualitative methods, with a focus on critical social issues such as whiteness in pedagogical content, carceral humanitarianism in K-12, and targeted racialized policing in...