Graduate Student

Jackie Lopez Santiago

Jackie is a PhD student in the School Psychology Program under the advisement of Professor Frank Worrell. Jackie’s primary research interest include: understanding the educational experiences of low income, Latine students; parent education as a mediator for Latine students academic success; and the social networks of Latine parents, particularly mothers.

Jackie is a first-generation college graduate who was born and raised in Santa Monica, Calif. She is an alumnae of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) where she began her research experience as a second year...

Krina Patel

Krina, a Kenyan-born Indian, has always been intrigued by the diverse educational systems across different countries. Her passion for engineering design was sparked during her senior year of high school when a baking mishap inspired her to pursue an engineering degree at Penn State. As an undergraduate, she was involved in design thinking, engineering education, and organizational psychology research at the Pennsylvania State University (Do-iT Lab). Upon completing her Bachelor's in Engineering Science from Penn State in 2022, Krina began her PhD studies in the SESAME program...

Emily Reich

Emily Reich (she/her) is a first-year doctoral student in the Policy, Politics, and Leadership cluster in the School of Education. She comes to graduate school with questions about the ways in which bureaucracy and the school staff who wield it shape the educational lives of marginalized and minitoritized students.

Emily received a BS in Special Education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2010. She holds credentials to teach Special Education to students in kindergarten through age twenty-one in California and Wisconsin. Before coming to Berkeley, Emily spent many...

Mark Pommer

Mark Pommer is a doctoral student in the School Psychology program at UC Berkeley. Mark received his EdS in school psychology from Columbia University. His current research interests include bilingual evaluations, second language acquisition, and addressing disproportionality of English language learners in special education. Mark is also involved in hope theory and application research, international school psychology, and assistive technology research and design.

Mark’s return to academia was inspired and informed by his 16-year career as a Nationally Certified School...

Eric Assan

Eric Assan (He/Him) is a 1st year Master's degree student in the Policy, Politics, and Leadership cluster in the School of Education. He is also pursuing a graduate certificate in Applied Data Science. He is an awardee of the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program, a fully funded scholarship program for African students and the first Education student to be awarded this scholarship. Prior to joining the BSE, Eric received an MEd in Educational Management from Huzhou University, China in 2022 and graduated with a Bachelor's of Social Sciences Education at the University of Cape Coast...

Joy Esboldt

Joy Esboldt is a doctoral candidate in the Critical Studies of Race, Class, and Gender cluster at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Education. Her research focuses on teachers’ learning about race, racism, and anti-racism as it intersects with gender and cultural politics. Joy’s work engages a multilevel intersectional analysis, locating the work of teachers and conceptualizations of racial justice within interactional, organizational, and sociopolitical environments. Joy’s dissertation examines the co-construction and enactment of racial discourses across multiple sites...

Hoyun Kim

Hoyun Kim is a PhD student in the Policy, Politics, and Leadership cluster at the School of Education. Her research interests lie in the experiences of students in higher education and examining postsecondary institutions as organizations: topics pertaining to student agency, equity, accessibility of higher education, and the behavior and incentives of postsecondary institutions. More broadly, she aims to understand and reason the purpose and power of higher education through her work.

Her interests are informed by her experiences attending different forms of public schools in the...

Caleb Dawson

Caleb E. Dawson is a community organizer, dancer, and Black feminist ethnographer from Federal Way, Wash. Caleb indulges in reimagining and redistributing state-sanctioned resources to build life-affirming institutions that sustain state-forsaken peoples.

A PhD candidate in Critical Studies of Race, Class, and Gender, Caleb engages in humanistic social science research about antiblackness in higher education and the myriad ways Black folk survive and create life amidst antiblack social structures. His dissertation ethnographically investigates what it takes for Black campus leaders...

Elaine (Hua) Luo

Elaine Luo is a PhD candidate in the School Psychology Program at Berkeley School of Education (BSE). Prior to joining the BSE, Elaine received her MEd in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2020 and her BA in Education Sciences from the University of California, Irvine in 2018.

Elaine's current research focuses on adolescents' ethnic-racial identity development under the influence of various entities in their ecological system and the impact of ethnic-racial identity development on their mental health and developmental outcomes.

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Xinyu (Celia) Wei

Xinyu (Celia) Wei is a second-year Master’s student in the Learning Sciences and Human Development program at the School of Education at UC Berkeley. As an international scholar from China, Xinyu desires to help students celebrate productive struggles, leverage everyday experiences, and develop intellectual and sociocritical thinking skills to tackle worldwide equity barriers within STEM education. Her mission guides her as an emergent researcher who works with classroom teachers and students to design and implement meaningful and culturally grounded mathematics and science...