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10/28/2026

Next up in our grad spotlight series is Johanna Solomon, political science Ph.D. ’15. Most people would do almost anything to avoid standing in the middle of a room where 90 people are shouting at each other. For Johanna, this is an environment that feels, if not comfortable, then deeply purposeful.

“I was born to be in the middle of that level of chaos,” she says, laughing at the realization.

For Johanna, who earned her Ph.D. at UC Irvine in political science in 2015 and who is now an assistant professor at Kent State University in the School of Peace and Conflict Studies, conflict has never been something to avoid. It is a place where people confront their own assumptions and sometimes change their minds. Across a career devoted to dialogue, mediation and peace building, Johanna has built her work around the central belief that lasting solutions only emerge when people are willing to listen across difference.

At UC Irvine, Johanna found a program flexible enough to hold an interest not contained by a single discipline. The Ph.D. program in political science, ranked among the top 20 at public universities, offered the intellectual range for her to pursue psychology as well. She also found a place where her interests in power and identity converged. The Center for Citizen Peacebuilding brought faculty, students and community members together. It supported programs for citizen peacebuilding, including student researchers like Johanna. There she was able to experience the community and mentorship of the other board members. Faculty opened their homes, community members hosted students for dinners and conversations, and relationships stretched beyond academic boundaries.

“It was transformative to see that community members cared that much about connecting and humanizing people,” she says.

Those experiences reinforced a lesson Johanna still carries into her own classrooms today, that intellectual work and human care are inseparable.

Now a faculty member at Kent State University, Johanna continues to teach dialogue, mediation and conflict resolution while facilitating community-based initiatives across political, religious and cultural divides.

More at our link in profile.

University of California, Irvine University of California UCI Alumni UCI Department of Political Science Kent State University UC Irvine Graduate Division

10/27/2026

Congrats to María Montenegro, UC Irvine assistant professor of global and international studies, who is among nine UCI assistant professors to be awarded Hellman Fellowships, which are bestowed annually to support research by junior faculty. They join an elite group of 112 UC Irvine Society of Hellman Fellows since 2013, when the Hellman Fellows Fund was established at UCI.

Montenegro's project, “Archiving Against Erasure: Documenting the Quiet Removal of Public Memory,” bridges her interests in critical archival theory, Indigenous and Native American studies, critical Latinx Indigeneities, Indigenous law and politics.

“Archiving Against Erasure documents the removal and alteration of monuments, exhibits, signs, webpages, and other forms of public memory happening across U.S. federal institutions,” she says. “By preserving what is being erased — and the traces these acts of erasure leave behind — the project builds an urgent, liberatory archive against forgetting and a record for accountability, community memory, scholarly inquiry and future generations.”

More on her work and fellow recipients at our link in profile.

https://www.socsci.uci.edu/newsevents/news/2026/2026-10-27-montenegro-named-hellman-fellow

University of California, Irvine University of California

10/26/2026

Our next grad spotlight features Jen Zelnick, anthropology Ph.D. ’22. While doing field work in Cambodia, Jen discovered her colleagues had been keeping a secret. The revelation would set her research on an entirely new path.

As a Luce Scholar, Jen spent a year in Southeast Asia working with a small public health organization exchanging needles and syringes to prevent the spread of HIV. She practiced her skills in the native Khmer language on a daily basis. Then, one day she walked into a meeting where, to her surprise, her Cambodian coworkers were conversing in perfect English.

“We’re all from California,” they explained. “But your boss said not to tell you.”

They were among a few hundred people who had been deported from the U.S. after living there for decades. Right away, Jen knew that this unique population would be the subject of her future dissertation – she just needed to get into graduate school first.

Pursuing that goal would take her to Chicago, Irvine and back to Cambodia to earn her Ph.D. before accepting a role at the State Bar of California where she could apply the lessons from those experiences to expand access to justice at home.

“For me, it was important to find professors who triangulated my project quite well,” she says of her UC Irvine anthropology Ph.D. program. “I know I wouldn't have gotten that elsewhere — because I looked.”

At UC Irvine, Jen received prestigious dissertation grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Social Science Research Council, The Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Center for Khmer Studies, and the Center for Engaged Scholarship. At every step, she says she felt supported by her faculty advisors.

She also bonded with her cohort and was part of a trio of anthropology graduate students who visited each other during their fieldwork in Asia, and later served as bridesmaids in each other’s weddings.

“The cohort and the professors I worked with were incredibly supportive. I know from friends who went to grad school elsewhere that was not their experience,” Jen says. “True collegiality really, really, made the UC Irvine program worthwhile for me.”

More at our link in profile.

University of California, Irvine University of California UCI Alumni UC Irvine Graduate Division

10/23/2026

Next up in our grad spotlight series is Clara Bradley, logic & philosophy of science Ph.D. ’24. The universe presents physicists with enough problems of its own; Clara studies the ones physicists create for themselves. When scientists develop a theory, what exactly have they discovered? When two theories appear different but make the same predictions, are they describing the same reality? And when physicists claim to understand the world, what kind of understanding have they achieved?

As a philosopher of science whose research sits at the intersection of physics, mathematics and philosophy, these are the kinds of questions Clara explores. They are also the questions that first captured her imagination as a teenager and eventually led her from England to UC Irvine, home to one of the world’s top five programs in both philosophy of physics and mathematics before joining the faculty at University College London.

To understand Clara’s work, it helps to understand the discipline she chose to pursue. For most people, philosophy and physics seem worlds apart. One discipline brings to mind images of laboratories and equations; the other, abstract debates about knowledge and truth. Clara’s work exists where those worlds meet.

"Philosophy of science seeks to understand how science works, why scientific knowledge is trustworthy and how scientific practice can be improved," she says.

The field steps back from scientific discoveries themselves to examine the processes that produce them. It asks how theories are developed, how evidence functions and what scientists mean when they claim to know something about the world. Yet these questions touch on how human beings make sense of reality. For Clara, they have been a lifelong fascination.

More at our link in profile.

University of California, Irvine University of California UCI Alumni UC Irvine Graduate Division UCL

10/22/2026

How does airline traffic affect U.S. employment? Do local governments engage in property tax competition? How do building height regulations affect city size? Over the course of his 40-year academic career, UC Irvine Distinguished Professor emeritus Jan K. Brueckner has pursued groundbreaking research spanning urban and public economics, transportation economics and real estate finance. Published widely in top journals including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Public Economics, and the Journal of Urban Economics where he served as editor for 16 years, Brueckner’s work answers important questions that impact how we live, work and travel. While he officially retired from UCI in 2025, Brueckner remains an active researcher and frequent expert voice on these and other timely topics.

In honor of his important contributions, the Department of Economics has established the aptly named Jan K. Brueckner Medal for Distinction in Economic Research. It recognizes a UCI scholar in the early years of an academic career whose work has made an original contribution to economic knowledge. The medal honors research that asks novel questions, uses rigorous methods, and, like Brueckner’s work, is influential within the field.

The department is pleased to announce Miguel Zerecero, economics assistant professor, as the inaugural Brueckner Medal recipient. Zerecero is a macroeconomist whose research spans spatial and labor economics. He’s particularly interested in how differences in birthplace affect differences in standards of living across people within the same country. His work finds that people born in economically distressed areas face more disadvantages than those born in areas with access to more opportunity. Using advanced modeling and methods, his research aims to quantify how much of the welfare inequality can be attributed to this issue. In naming Zerecero as the Brueckner Medal’s first recipient, the award committee cited his “research that asks why people stay in struggling places, and what determines wages when firms and unions both hold labor market power. His work on attachment to birthplace documents that workers accept wages roughly ten percent lower to live where they were born, and shows that models ignoring this attachment overstate both how readily workers move and the efficiency cost of place-based policy. With a co-author, he finds in a separate paper now under revision at Econometrica that union bargaining partially offsets the misallocation created by employer power. Meanwhile, his methodological work corrects bias in wage decompositions and dramatically speeds up the inversion algorithms used across trade, urban economics, and industrial organization. The committee was persuaded by both the ambition of the questions and the care with which the methods supporting them have been built.”

Zerecero earned his bachelor’s at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México and his master’s and doctorate at the Toulouse School of Economics in France. He joined the UCI faculty in 2021.

More at our link in profile.

University of California, Irvine University of California

10/21/2026

With parents who are both successful dentists, Natalie Fu assumed her studies and career would traverse a similar path. But after running the gauntlet of internships, volunteer work and paid positions, she’s learned to maximize her inherent management skills to improve operations in numerous and varied settings — including healthcare, food and beverage, small businesses and student associations.

Fu was a biology major in her freshman year, but an early positive experience with AP Psychology inspired her to enroll in additional psychology classes at UC Irvine. Intrigued by what she learned, she met with academic advisors from both the School of Biological Sciences and the School of Social Sciences a dozen times.

“The people at social sciences were helpful in drafting a concrete plan,” she says. “They really explained the entire process and reassured me about switching to psychology. They said there are so many opportunities that I can still achieve with this major. And I wanted to study something I was passionate about.”

Inspired by those meetings, Fu — a self-described people person — decided to change her major from biology to psychology with a minor in management and public health. Instead of pursuing the clinical path, however, Fu plans to leverage her expertise in psychology to manage and lead organizations.

More at our link in profile.

University of California, Irvine University of California UC Irvine Joe C. Wen School of Population & Public Health UC Irvine Paul Merage School of Business

10/20/2026

Our next grad spotlight features Temitope Famodu, global studies Ph.D. ’26. After receiving their undergraduate degree, Temi worked in nonprofit organizations serving refugees and students in Chicago. The work was meaningful, but they found themself preoccupied by larger structural questions. They wanted to understand the forces shaping displacement, migration and inequality. Why were people moving to the U.S.? How did global politics shape local experiences? What could organizations realistically accomplish within larger systems?

One of their undergraduate mentors encouraged them to consider graduate school and pointed them toward the relatively new doctoral program in global studies at the University of California, Irvine.

"What I love about it is that it's transdisciplinary," they say. "I think that is the best way to approach learning about anything, especially in a time of multiple crises. I wish that global studies was a standard pedagogical orientation because I think it helps to deepen understanding in any line of educational inquiry," they add.

Temi successfully defended their dissertation in May and graduated in June. They plan to pursue academic positions while transforming their dissertation into a book-length manuscript. The foundation and expertise they have gained as a Ph.D. student at UC Irvine are unlikely to lose their urgency.

"My skill set will always be relevant, no matter what industry or place I end up in," they say. "I think we will always need to examine how power operates on a global scale by centering the lived-experiences of people who have been structurally dispossessed."

More at our link in profile.

University of California UCI Alumni UC Irvine Graduate Division

10/19/2026

On October 13, researchers from the University of California and leaders from local non-profits, community organizations, and city and state government convened at the University of California, Irvine and online for the first of three Policy Innovation Days to share expertise and insights on municipal chatbots. Funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the Engineering+Society Institute on AI at UC Irvine (ProperAI) and enabled by the Alliance for Local Leaders International (ALLIES), the campus and community collaborative is working to better understand and measure how interactions with AI-enabled tools on city and government websites help or hinder residents and their overall civic engagement.

“Our goal is really to bridge the divide between policy makers and the research community so that we can better understand the usefulness and impact of these tools,” said Bill Maurer, UC Irvine social sciences dean and professor of anthropology and law, in his welcoming remarks. “There are clusters of us working on these questions while municipalities are simultaneously rolling out AI to their constituents, so it’s a great opportunity to bring people together to share what’s working and what needs work.”

As the project’s principal investigator, he helped create the interdisciplinary group that’s spearheading the effort. Joining him are UC Irvine colleagues Athina Markopoulou, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of ProperAI, Jackie Ku, ’26 political science Ph.D., and Olivia Figueira, ’26 computer science Ph.D.; and ALLIES’ Ben Polsky, ethics and technology practitioner fellow at Stanford and director of AI and technology programs, and Trevaughn Latimer, director of strategy and operations. They received a $30,000 SSRC grant in June to host the three-day series and develop evaluation tools and democratic engagement indicators for municipal chatbots, while research by the Ph.D. students has been supported by ProperAI to inform these convenings.

More at our link in profile.

The Henry Samueli School of Engineering at UC Irvine CITRIS Long Beach City UC Davis Washington University in St. Louis Northeastern University

10/15/2026

Our next grad spotlight features Derek Tran, economics M.S. ’21, Ph.D. ’24. When Derek started graduate school at the University of California, Irvine, he expected to become a professor. Instead, his career has taken him from publishing academic research to working for Amazon – one of the world’s largest private employers of Ph.D. economists – to Upstart, a fast-growing AI-powered lending company. Along the way, he discovered something he hadn’t expected: an economics Ph.D. can take you almost anywhere.

“Eighty percent of what I use day-to-day in a job like this comes from the knowledge gained from the Ph.D. program, whether it’s causal, Bayesian or structural economics,” says Derek. “Personally, I think economics is the best degree to get. You could argue for computer science or AI, but econ gives you an understanding of the world you can’t get anywhere else.”

Learn more about his experience at our link in profile.

University of California UCI Alumni UC Irvine Graduate Division Upstart Amazon.com

10/14/2026

There’s no place like home. For Jennifer dos Santos, the memorable movie line is a fitting description of a career coming full circle. On October 1, dos Santos began her tenure as the new assistant dean of the School of Social Sciences, stepping into the school’s top staff leadership role after serving for the summer in an interim capacity. The appointment marks a particularly meaningful milestone for the Anteater alumna who found her professional footing in social sciences more than a decade ago.

“The opportunity to be back in social sciences feels like a homecoming,” she says. “Many of the people I got to know in my previous roles are still here, along with the strong sense of community that I loved being a part of. I’m excited to reconnect, get to know the many new members who’ve since joined the school, listen and learn from them, and continue finding ways to bring people together around our shared mission.”

Building community is a hallmark of the people-centric leadership style dos Santos has honed over her nearly two-decade career at UCI. That journey has taken her to five departments spanning four different schools, including African American studies and English in humanities; economics and anthropology in social sciences; and math in physical sciences before she landed the assistant dean position in social ecology. Along the way, dos Santos developed a deep understanding of university operations and the complexities of supporting academic units, while finding that the most rewarding part of understanding and refining administrative puzzles and processes was getting to know and work alongside the people behind them.

More at our link in profile.

University of California, Irvine University of California UCI Alumni UCI School of Social Ecology School of Humanities at UC Irvine UCI School of Physical Sciences UCI Claire Trevor School of the Arts

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