UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellows

2025-2027

Dr. Halle-Mackenzie Ashby
PPF, Department of History

Dr. Roberto Hernandez
PPF, Department of Mathematics

Dr. Thelma Patnett
PPF, Department of Criminology, Law and Society

2024-2026

2023-2024

Ashley Daniels, PPF

Ph. D., Howard University
“Engaging and Studying Black Women and Politics Through Community-Academic Partnerships”

Mentor: Associate Professor Davin Phoenix, Department of Political Science

Alein Haro-Ramos, PPF

Ph. D., University of California, Berkeley
“Examining the Cumulative Health Consequences of Illegality Among Older and Sicker Undocumented Immigrants”

Mentor: Associate Professor Annie Ro, Department of Health, Society, and Behavior

Alejandra Hernandez Teran, PPF

Ph. D., Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Ecología
“Disentangling Microbiome Effects on Plant Adaptation”

Mentor: Distinguished Professor Brandon Gaut, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Jessica Kelz, PPF

Ph. D., University of California, Irvine
“Modeling the Dynamic Molecular Basis of Aggregation Disease Pathways”

Mentor: Distinguished Professor Douglas Tobias, Department of Chemistry

Ellen Louis, PPF

Ph. D., Yale University
“Damning Attachments: Slavery's Structure of Feeling”

Mentor: Associate Professor Sora Han, Department of Criminology, Society, and Law

Jennifer Manoukian, PPF

Ph. D., University of California, Los Angeles
“Spreading Western Armenian in the Post-Ottoman Diaspora: A Social History (1915-1965)”

Mentor: Professor Houri Berberian, Department of History

Arón Montenegro, PPF

Ph. D., University of California, Los Angeles
“Entre Flor y Fusil/Between Flower and Rifle: Central American and Caribbean Arts Production”

Mentor: Professor Keramet Reiter, Department of Criminology, Law, and Society

Jarunetr (Nadia) Sae-Lim, PPF
Ph. D., Washington University in St. Louis
“Reconstructing Southeast Asian Monsoon variability since the Late Pleistocene: a cross-archive regional-scale hydroclimate synthesis using an inverse modeling approach”

Mentor: Associate Professor Kathleen Johnson, Department of Earth Systems Science

2022-2023

Dr. Caroline Collins

Caroline Collins is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of History at UC Irvine. She holds a PhD in Communication from UC San Diego, an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside, and a B.A. in American Literature and Culture from UCLA. Her work examines public remembrances of the American West through archival methods, ethnographic study, media production, and public history exhibition. Her public scholarship includes exhibits and media produced in collaboration with the California Institute for Rural Studies, the California Historical Society, the California African American Museum, Exhibit Envoy, and the First Nations Development Institute. Dr. Collins' research has been supported by the Bylo Chacon Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation / US Latino Digital Humanities Center, California Humanities, UCSD Frontiers of Innovation Scholars Program, the UC Consortium for Black Studies in California Project, the Herbert I. Schiller Communication Dissertation Fellowship, and the UC Office of the President.

PPFP Research Topic Title: Black Mariners of the Black Pacific: Reimagining Race, Migration, and Diaspora

Mentor: Dr. David Igler

Department, School: Department of History, School of Humanities

Dr. Carolina Flores

Carolina Flores received their PhD in Philosophy from Rutgers University. Their research is driven by questions about how our cognitive structures and the social world interact. They are especially interested in how cognition can be hijacked in ways that contribute to the perpetuation of oppressive social structures---and in how we can fight back. Their dissertation was on evidence-resistance beliefs: what their role in cognition is, how changeable they are, and what they tell us about the nature of belief and the human mind. At UC Irvine, they are planning to focus on belief and social identity. They plan to look at how social identities are implemented in our minds (is centering a social identity a matter of one’s beliefs, or does it involve other attitudes?) and at how they shape how we interact with evidence. In addition, they are keen on addressing systemic marginalization in academia. While in graduate school, they directed Minorities and Philosophy, the leading network in philosophy concerned with addressing questions of marginalization in academic philosophy, organized a conference on oppression and resistance, and founded a feminist philosophy reading group and speaker series in their department.

PPFP Research Topic Title: Belief and social identity

Mentor: Dr. Annalisa Coliva and Dr. Kate Ritchie

Department, School: Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities

Dr. Brittany Miles

Dr. Brittany Elaina Miles is originally from Gardena, California. She has a major in Physics and a minor in Geophysics and Planetary Physics from UCLA. Her masters degree and doctorate are in Astronomy and Astrophysics from UC Santa Cruz. Dr. Miles uses ground and space-based telescopes to study the atmospheres of brown dwarfs and exoplanets to understand their chemical composition. She also invests time in understanding how to build better instruments for telescopes to find smaller and cooler exoplanets.

PPFP Research Topic: Frontiers of Exoplanet Detection and Atmospheric Characterization

Mentor: Dr. Stephanie Sallum

Department, School: Department of Physics & Astronomy, School of Physical Sciences

Dr. Nivedita Nath

Prior to joining the University of California, Irvine, as a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Nivedita Nath received her PhD in history from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research and teaching examines environmental history, South Asian social and cultural history, the history of race and caste, anti-colonial thought, environmental justice, and feminist geography. Her current book project, Race, Caste and Modern Imaginaries of the Himalayas, traces the roots of contemporary ecological and social injustices in the Central Himalayas to the expansion of colonial rule, capitalist enclosures, and the reification of caste-based relations of land and labor across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her next project asks what the archives of Central Himalayan communities can teach us about the history of climate change as well as the possibilities of global environmental justice. Nivedita’s academic and public scholarship has appeared in Environmental History, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, Arcadia: Explorations in Environmental History, Adivasi Resurgence, and The Wire.

PPFP Research Topic Title: Conservation from the Margins: Environmental Justice and Indigenous Resistance in the Central Himalayas

Mentor: Dr. David Fedman

Department, School: Department of History, School of Humanities

Dr. Ka-eul Yoo

Ka-eul Yoo (유가을) is an interdisciplinary critical race and ethnic studies scholar and educator. She specializes in contemporary multi-ethnic U.S. literature and culture, focusing on transnational Asian American, critical disability, U.S. war and empire, global feminisms, and drama & performance studies. In particular, she concentrates on tracing the relationships between the genealogy of biopolitical precarity, U.S. imperial violence, and disability in the global South. She received her Ph.D. in Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz with designated emphases in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Feminist Studies, and both B.A. and M.A. in English at Yonsei University, South Korea.

Ka-eul’s publishing trajectory reflects her commitment to public-facing, socially-engaged scholarship. Her most recent article was published in Amerasia Journal and won multiple awards, including from the Association for Asian American Studies and the American Studies Association. Ka-eul’s first book project investigates how the United States constructed and leveraged concepts of disease and disability in its military operations in Asia and at home to further its Cold War agenda. By using original sources in Asia that have been largely inaccessible due to Cold War censorship and language access, she further unearths grassroots resistance to this pathologization. This project has received support from numerous organizations, including the Social Science Research Council and the Association for Asian Studies. In addition to her academic research, Ka-eul translates feminist multimedia art, activism, and scholarship on disability justice published in South Korea. She is also an active member of the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective.

PPFP Research Topic Title: Cold War Disability Narratives, Comparative Racialization, Disability Justice, and Grassroots Activism in Asia and Asian America

Mentor: Dr. James Kyung-Jin Lee

Department, School: Department of Asian American Studies, School of Humanities

2021-2022

Dr. Donovan A. Argueta

University of California, Riverside
PhD in Bioengineering 2019

Dr. Donovan A. Argueta is originally from Palmdale, CA and is a first-generation Mexican-Guatemalan American. He was the first in his family to attend a 4-year university and completed their undergraduate studies with a BS in Bioengineering in 2014 at the California Lutheran University. Donovan then began their predoctoral studies at the University of California, Riverside, where he studied the role of the endocannabinoid system in feeding across disease states with an emphasis on diet-induced obesity. Now as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Irvine, Donovan investigates potential roles for the endocannabinoid system in pain found in Sickle Cell Disease. His goal is to lead a research laboratory to train a new generation of scientists that represent the diversity of the world and bring innovative approaches to critical issues in biomedical sciences.

PPFP Fellowship Research Topic: Role for Endocannabinoids in Sickle Cell Disease Pain

Mentor: Dr. Kalpna Gupta

Department, School: Department of Medicine - Hematology/ Oncology, School of Medicine

Dr. Jamal Batts

University of California, Berkeley
PhD in African American and African Diaspora Studies 2021

Jamal Batts, PhD is a scholar, writer, curator. His dissertation project, Immoral Panics: Black Queer Aesthetics and the Construction of Risk, reflects on the relation between black queer contemporary visual and literary art and risk-taking from the early HIV/AIDS crisis to the present. His writing appears in ASAP/J, the catalogue for The New Museum’s exhibit Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, Open Space, New Life Quarterly, and SFMOMA’s website in conjunction with their Modern Cinema series. He is a 2020 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives LGBTQ Research Fellow, and a 2020 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Scholar-in-Residence. He is a member of the curatorial collective The Black Aesthetic who have organized four seasons of black experimental film screenings in the Bay Area and produced three edited collections of critical essays, poetry, and visual art.

Mentor: Dr. Bridget R. Cooks

Department, School: Department of African American Studies, School of Humanities

Dr. Ashwak S. Hauter

University of California, Berkeley
PhD in Medical Anthropology 2010

Dr. Ashwak Sam Hauter is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine and will be joining the UC Santa Cruz Department of Anthropology as an assistant professor in the fall of 2022. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in hospitals and clinics among physicians and patients in Sana’a, Yemen; Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; and Amman, Jordan. Her dissertation research on the experience of health and medicine amongst Muslim physicians, scholars, and patients, including its training and education, draws on both ethnographic and historical work of Arabic Philosophy and Islamic Medicine in the region. A Yemeni-American first-generation scholar whose first book will examine medical debates over reform, Islam and expertise, and ‘afiya (wellbeing) in Southern Arabia. The second line of research she is pursuing examines connections between war and mental health in Yemen, as well the ways in which artists, filmmakers, and clinical psychologists within the country are responding to the immense challenges facing their fellow citizens

PPFP Fellowship Research Topic: Prescription: The Work of Culture, Medicine, and the Law in and after the War in Yemen

Mentor: Dr. Sherine Hamdy

Department, School: Department of Anthropology, School of Social Sciences

Dr. E.M. Hernandez

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
PhD in Philosophy 2021

E. M. (or Em) Hernandez received their PhD in philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, completing a dissertation under the direction of Susan Wolf. Their work can be found at the intersection of normative ethics, moral psychology, philosophy of race, and trans philosophy. While many philosophers think of ethics as the study of how we ought to exercise our will, or what rules we should follow in our practical deliberation, Em’s work concerns those many central parts of ethics that are left out of this conception -- in particular, the ethics of perception and of feeling. How ought we perceive each other? What is the moral dimension to our feelings? Perceptions and feelings are not voluntary, nor are they the conclusions of practical deliberation, and yet they reflect our character, and are morally evaluable in many of the same ways that we are. This research attempts to understand the moral evaluation of perception and feeling, among other things, and their relationship to our moral character. Em is particularly interested in how our socialization in a racist, sexist, and transphobic society shapes our perceptions of others and how growing up internalizing such ideology can alter our moral character and all the downstream effects that has on how we relate to each other interpersonally.

PPFP Fellowship Research Topic: Racism and Interpersonal Ethics

Mentor: Dr. Aaron James

Department, School: Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities

Dr. Nadia Léonard

Princeton University
PhD in Chemistry 2019

Nadia Léonard received her BS in chemistry at Brown University. Following her undergraduate studies, she taught math and science for grades K-4th at a charter school in the Greater Boston area. She then conducted her doctoral studies as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow at Princeton University. Her doctoral research focused on developing earth-abundant transition metal catalysts for site-selective functionalization of hydrocarbon feedstocks. During her studies at Princeton, Nadia served as a Diversity Fellow for the Graduate School, Office of Diversity and Inclusion where she worked with the LGBT Center, Women*s Center, and Carl A. Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding to develop programming to support the graduate student community. Following completion of her PhD in 2019, she moved to southern California to begin a postdoctoral position at the University of California, Irvine. Her research as a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Chemistry focuses on understanding on a molecular level how electrostatic interactions, key to a variety of enzymatic processes, can be incorporated and harnessed at synthetic systems for reaction control.

PPFP Fellowship Research Topic: Unraveling Electric Field Effects in Catalysis: From Enzymes to Transition Metals

Mentor: Dr. Jenny Yang

Department, School: Department of Chemistry, School of Physical Sciences

Dr. Jessica López-Espino

New York University
PhD in Anthropology 2021

Jessica López-Espino, PhD in Anthropology is a recent graduate from New York University and a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine. Jessica is a legal and linguistic anthropologist specializing in child welfare as socio-legal institution. Her first book project traces Latinx parents’ efforts in a California child welfare court to regain or maintain custody of their children despite common institutional narratives that position low-income, Spanish-dominant, and Latinx families as “risky parents.” This work is based on 18 months of ethnographic observations in a Northern California child welfare and the surrounding community, supported by the National Science Foundation and American Bar Foundation. Jessica’s research engages with current debates about the power and limits of the law in shaping social change, as well as debates about how language practices and racialized perceptions can intersect to reproduce inequality in social institutions.

PPFP Fellowship Research Topic: At the Margins of Parenthood: Latinxs in Child Welfare

Mentor: Dr. Susan Coutin

Department, School: Department of Criminology, Law and Society, School of Social Ecology

Dr. Megh Marathe

University of Michigan
PhD in Information Studies 2021

Megh Marathe is President's Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. Their research is situated at the intersection of science and technology studies, disability studies, and social studies of medicine. Marathe studies expert work practices and marginalized people's experiences, particularly in healthcare. Their work generates critical theory and implications for inclusive sociotechnical systems. Marathe has received fellowships from Microsoft Research and the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities for their work on the social implications of medical technology. For more information on Dr. Marathe's research, please visit their website.

PPFP Fellowship Research Topic: Social and Ethical Implications of Neural Implants

Mentor: Dr. Gillian Hayes

Department, School: Department of Informatics, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

Dr. Christine M. Slaughter

University of California, Los Angeles, PhD in Political Science

Mentor: Dr. Michael Tesler

Department, School: Department of Political Science, School of Social Sciences

Dr. Princess H. Williams

University of Michigan, PhD in Political Science

Mentor: Dr. Davin Phoenix

Department, School: Department of Political Science, School of Social Sciences