Tom is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on political violence, with a particular interest in non-state punishment, informal institutions, and the foundations of local order. Tom received his B.A. in Political Science (with honors) from Northwestern University in 2021. Before joining Berkeley, he also worked as a volunteer in the urban periphery of São Paulo.
Isabel is a Political Science Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Comparative Politics concentration. Her research centers on comparative constitutional design, executive constraints, and states of emergency, with a regional focus on Latin America. Before joining Berkeley, Isabel worked as a researcher in the Centro de Estudios Públicos think tank and Fundación Multitudes, both Chilean organizations. She holds an M.A. in the Social Sciences and a B.A. in Political Science (with honors) and Romance Literatures & Languages from the University of Chicago.
Mango is pursuing her PhD in Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley. As a comparativist, she aims to explore the implications of electoral violence on political accountability, the effects of electoral violence on the long-term welfare of historically marginalized communities, and the effectiveness of institutional reforms intended to mitigate the occurrence of electoral violence. She is equally interested in examining the effects of the weaponization of sexual violence against women during political violence on the participation of women in politics as voters and as candidates. Her regional focus is on East Africa.
In 2017, she worked as the assistant editor to the ‘Asian Women’ journal at the Research Institute of Asian Women (RIAW), Sookmyung Women’s University. She has also interned with The Asia Foundation, on the Women Business Center and Incubation Project (WBC), a microfinance development project that works to foster women entrepreneurs with small and medium-sized businesses in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Mango has a Master’s in Development Policy from the Korea Development Institute (KDI) School of Public Policy and Management, and a Bachelor’s in Political Science and International Relations from Sookmyung Women’s University in South Korea.
Clara Bicalho is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her substantive research interests include political participation and accountability, and migration and the political geography of migrant integration. Her methodological interests have focused on experimental research methods and on developing tools to improve and communicate research designs. She received a B.A. in Political Science from New York University Abu Dhabi and has worked as a researcher and predoctoral fellow at the NYU Center for Technology and Economic Development and the Berlin Social Science Center, respectively.
Juan Campos is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. With an emphasis on Latin America, he studies the politics of security in the shadow of organized crime. His job market paper, “Police Reform as an Instrument of Criminal Protection,” examines how police centralization reforms that make state governments more powerful can potentially be co-opted by governors to protect rather than repress criminal organizations (COs). Juan’s other research explores how COs modify their behaviors when faced with state repression and how they undermine democracy through violence against politicians. Juan holds M.A. degrees in political science from UC Berkeley and California State University, Long Beach. He also holds a B.A. in government and international politics from George Mason University.
Sarah is pursuing a Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her thematic research interests include comparative politics, Africa and the African diaspora, and global political economy. In particular, she focuses on the convergence between international development and cross-cultural oppositions to oppression and conflict. Prior to beginning her doctoral program, Sarah worked as a Research and Development Manager in Tanzania, monitoring the efficacy of an NGO’s development projects deployed in villages across the rural Kilimanjaro region. Sarah received her B.A in International Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
Sakina is a PhD Student in the Political Science Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She is interested in studying changing citizen-state relationships with the proliferation of technology in welfare service delivery in South Asia. She is also interested in questions about migration and the politics of precarity. Sakina holds a Master’s in International Development Policy from Duke University, a Master’s in Public Policy & a Bachelor’s in Economics from the University of Mumbai. In the past, she has worked as a researcher with LibTech India, an organization focused on improving public service delivery, in collaboration with several people’s movements and campaigns in India.
Pranav is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, he had completed an M.Sc. in Political Science and Political Economy from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He also holds a B.A. in Economics from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi. His broad research interests include party systems, voting behavior, and the politics of public service delivery.
Alyssa is pursuing a Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. She is broadly interested in gender, representation, the political economy of development, and political inequality, with a regional focus on India. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., Alyssa conducted research as a Fulbright-Nehru Research Fellow at the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics in Pune, India, and as a Lombard Fellow directing the implementation of a large-scale survey in rural Maharashtra. Through CLEA and McGorrian Fellowships at the American Institute of Indian Studies in the Deccan College Post-Graduate Research Institute, Alyssa also spent a year learning Marathi in Pune, India. Alyssa has worked for the Women’s Economic Empowerment Unit at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., Vera Solutions in Mumbai, India, Chhori (Daughter) in Kathmandu, Nepal, and McKinsey & Company in Boston, MA. She holds an M.Sc. in Development Economics from Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a B.A. in Political Science and South Asian Studies from Dartmouth College.
Lily Medina is a Ph.D. student in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her substantive research interests include political violence, criminal governance and citizens’ attitudes towards state and non-state actors in Latin America. She holds an M.S. in statistics from Humboldt University of Berlin and a B.S. in industrial engineering from the University of Los Andes of Bogota. Before attending U.C. Berkeley, Lily was a predoctoral fellow at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) within the Institutions and Political Inequality unit. Her work includes evaluating community-driven development initiatives and their effect on citizen attitudes toward authority, as well as R-packages for experimental designs and Bayesian methods for causal inference.
Isabella C. Montini is a PhD Candidate in Political Science and a Research Associate at the Center for the Politics of Development at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work spans comparative politics and political economy, with a particular focus on welfare provision by both state and non-state actors, as well as political violence. Her dissertation examines claim-making behavior in urban peripheries where state and criminal actors compete for authority, focusing on how residents of Brazilian favelas navigate fragmented governance to access goods and services. Her methodological approach includes qualitative interviews, design-based inference, and survey experiments. Isabella was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil. Prior to her PhD, she worked as a research fellow at the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab at Stanford University. She holds an MA in Latin American Studies with a specialization in Political Economy from Stanford University and a BA in Political Science and Sociology from Humboldt University in Berlin.
Rachel is pursuing a JD/Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include comparative environmental law and politics, gender, and political representation in South Asia and Latin America. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., Rachel conducted research on gender and environmental politics as a Fulbright Fellow in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and as a post-graduate Georgetown Student Innovation for Public Service fellow in India. Previously, Rachel worked for the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero’s emerging market investments team, as well as for The Asia Group in Washington, D.C, and as a research assistant for the Gates Foundation in India. She holds a B.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University.
Yosef is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley with a focus on comparative politics. His broad research interests include African politics, ethnic politics, electoral politics, and political violence among others. He has a particular interest in parties and party systems in newly emerging democracies in sub–Saharan Africa. Furthermore, he is interested in exploring state formation processes, political institutions as well as elections and political representation in East Africa on a comparative plane with other emerging and developed democracies in different regions of the world. Prior to beginning his doctoral studies, Yosef worked as a research assistant in a collaborative field project by the World Bank, Oxford University, New York University Abu Dhabi and the Jobs Creation Commission in Ethiopia focusing on the labor market and youth unemployment in the capital, Addis Ababa. Yosef holds a B.A. in Political Science from New York University Abu Dhabi.