Penn-Birmingham Transatlantic Fellowship Program: 2023-2024 Fellows
Find out more about the Penn-Birmingham Transatlantic Fellows Program
Adriana Ceron
Adriana Ceron is a Ph.D. student in sociology at Yale University. Her research draws on quantitative and interview-based methods to examine how Central American immigrants fare in the United States and also in their country of origin. Her current research projects investigate the migration selection of recently deported Central Americans who intend to return to the United States, with a focus on their health status and transnational family structures. She has also researched the well-being of racialized minorities during COVID-19. Her work has received generous funding support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM), and the Mellon Mays Foundation. She received her M.A in Sociology from Yale University in 2023 and B.A. in Sociology with a minor in Latinx Studies from Pitzer College in 2018.
Caitlyn Yates
Caitlyn Yates is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on transit migration, human security, enforcement, and borders in Latin America. In particular, Yates focuses on the experiences of Caribbean, African, and Asian migrants through the Colombia-Panama borderlands known as the Darien Gap and the Mexico-US border. She is currently a non-resident fellow at the Strauss Center for International-Security & Law at the University of Texas at Austin and a non-resident fellow at the US-Mexico Center at the University of California at San Diego. Her research is supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers. Yates’ research has been published in the Journal of Ethnic & Migration Studies, Public Anthropologist, Victims & Offenders, and a number of public and policy facing outlets.
Estefania Castañeda Pérez
Estefania Castañeda Pérez is a postdoctoral fellow at the Penn Migration Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. from the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a B.A. in political science and interdisciplinary studies from San Diego State University. Trained as an interdisciplinary scholar, her research focuses on border politics, state power and institutions through the lens of race, ethnicity, and inequality. Her projects examine how routine contact with state institutions affect the racialization, citizenship, incorporation, and well-being of transborder commuters in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands. Estefania has published in Politics, Groups, and Identities, and has written public-facing immigration policy analyses in the NYU Latinx Project Intervenxions Blog and the North American Congress on Latin America. Her research has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and multiple grants from UCLA and the American Political Science Association. Estefania has held fellowships in the NYU Faculty-First Look Scholars Program, the Immigration Initiative at Harvard, and is currently a fellow at the Penn Migration Initiative. Originally from the Tijuana-San Ysidro borderlands and a first-generation college student, Estefania has advocated for transborder youth by serving as the co-president of the UCLA chapter for the Transfronterizx Alliance Student Organization, and has documented human rights violations at the border in collaboration with multiple immigrant rights organizations.
Gabrielle Cabrera
Gabrielle Cabrera is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. Broadly, her interests include affect, labor, kinship, gender, diversity, space & place, writing ethnography. She is a contributing author to We Are Not Dreamers: Undocumented Scholars Theorize Undocumented Life in the United States. Her research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, National Science Foundation, and Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund.
Hana Gebremariam
Hana is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Temple University. She holds a B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology from Middlebury College and an M.A. from Temple University. Hana’s research investigates studies of health inequality, mental health, higher education, and race and racism. Her dissertation work examines racial inequalities in college mental health services. It examines how students from different racial backgrounds engage campus mental health services and how colleges organize and respond to the needs of different student populations.
Hana is passionate about linking research to policy. She has held various roles in policy-oriented research organizations, including as a research assistant at the American Institutes for Research, a summer research associate at the RAND Corporation, and a graduate fellow at Temple University’s Public Policy Lab.
Hiromi Yumoto
Hiromi Yumoto (she/her) is a Senior Research Officer at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER), University of Essex. She earned her PhD from the University of Birmingham in 2023, generously supported by the Joint Japan/World Bank Graduate Scholarship Program (JJ/WBGSP). Her research revolves around Applied Microeconomics, the Economics of Migration, and Labor Economics, concentrating on the legal and economic integration of immigrants in host countries. Currently, she is engaged in research projects on refugee integration, exploring the impact of location characteristics on citizenship acquisition, the causal effects of civic integration training on labor market outcomes, and the roles of firms in refugee-native pay disparities, utilizing Dutch administration data.
Jee Sun (Jasmin) Lee
Jasmin is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at Rice University. She holds a B.A. in Public Policy Studies from the University of Chicago. Her research interests lie at the intersection between education, race/racism, and immigration. Some of these research projects include examining how private, supplementary education has shaped post-secondary inequality, the role of supports designed to support newly immigrated students, and how the interplay between state and local entities influences educational opportunities and experiences of students, families, educators, and community members. Jasmin found her start in research within the Research-Practice Partnership model, which has been integral to how she thinks about being a scholar who can bridge research and practice. In her spare time, Jasmin is usually knitting, finding new places to eat, or pestering those around her to let her dogsit for them. Jasmin’s correct pronouns are she/hers.
Kennia Coronado
Kennia Coronado is a Predoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests lie broadly in political behavior, representation, gender, political communication, and the politics of immigration as related to Latinos/as/xs and other minoritized populations in the United States. In her dissertation, she investigates the processes and mechanisms under which Latinos are mobilized to participate in U.S. elections—even when many are ineligible to vote.
Kennia holds and M.A. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a B.A. in Political Science and Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latinx Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana
Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana (she/her/hers), is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College (City University of New York). She is a cultural worker and interdisciplinary qualitative Latinx public scholar who studies contemporary processes of migration. Her current research project focuses on childhood arrival migrants to the United States. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, specializing in Latin American Literature and Cultures and a designated emphasis on Human Rights. De La Cruz Santana is a researcher in the Humanizing Deportation project, a community-based digital storytelling project and the world’s most robust public qualitative archive that documents the human consequences of contemporary regimes of migration and border control in the United States and Mexico. She is the director of the Playas de Tijuana Mural Project, an interactive mural on the initial point of the westernmost point of the US-Mexico border, which documents the stories of (deported) childhood arrivals through portraiture and digital storytelling. Other digital humanities projects include the Leave No One Behind Mural Project and DACAmented: DREAMs Without Borders digital storytelling project.
Louisa Brain
Louisa is a Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholar in the School of Geography at Queen Mary University of London. Her research explores how people navigate immobility and mobility in and around floodplains in Kenya. In addition to the Leverhulme Trust’s Mobile People Programme and Queen Mary University of London, her research has been funded by the Royal Geographical Society and the British Institute in Eastern Africa. Louisa has almost ten years’ experience working in project management and research roles focused on development and migration. She holds undergraduate degrees in Development and International Relations from the University of Queensland and a MSc in Migration, Mobility and Development from SOAS University of London.
Min Ji Kim
Min Ji Kim is a Ph.D. student in sociology at UC San Diego. She received her BA in Government, with a concentration in International Relations, from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and completed her MA in Legal Theory (or Legal Philosophy) through a research fellowship from the Ecole normale supérieure (ENS) in Paris, France. The degree was conferred by the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). Prior to joining the Sociology Ph.D. programme in 2020, she worked for the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN agency, the International Labour Organization, on migrant workers’ rights and labour migration policy. Her research interests lie at the intersection of political sociology and international migration, in particular refugee or forced migration. She is currently working on a project exploring the relationship between states’ political regime type and their policy/performance on refugee and asylum, using quantitative and statistical methods. She is also interested in the case of Germany’s reception of Syrian refugees in 2015-2016 and what that says about host societies’ capacity for altruism and solidarity, as well as for xenophobia and nationalist populism.
Natasha Nicholls
Natasha Nicholls is a PhD student based within the Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS) at the University of Birmingham, UK. She holds an LLB in Law and Sociology and an LLM in Human Rights Law, both from Cardiff University, Wales.
Her doctoral research focuses on the UK Community Sponsorship Scheme (CS), a community activated refugee resettlement scheme. Her research specifically explores the experiences of the volunteers involved with the scheme, on the relationships between the volunteers and the refugees and how involvement in CS shapes the civil society trajectory of volunteers. She recently co-authored an article which explored the cycle of emotions within CS. She also works as an RA on a project focusing on migrant descendants' intercultural competence.
Noor Amr
Noor Amr is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at Stanford University. She is conducting dissertation fieldwork alongside the church asylum (Kirchenasyl) movement in Germany, paying attention to the relationship between religion, migration, race/ethnicity, sovereignty, and political belonging. Her ethnographic research explores how Christian sanctuary, a form of shelter from the state, becomes a means through which rejected asylum-seekers gain legibility as subjects worthy of legal recognition. Her broader theoretical interests include political theology, histories of sanctuary/confinement, and the coloniality of asylum. Prior to her doctoral work, she received a B.A. in Politics from Willamette University and an M.T.S. in Philosophy of Religion from Harvard Divinity School, where she was a Dean’s Fellow.
Nuni Jorgensen
Nuni Jorgensen is a Geography PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and a Leverhulme doctoral scholar. She holds a M.A in Demography from the Centre for Development and Regional Planning (Cedeplar, Brazil). Before starting her PhD at QMUL, Nuni worked as Population Data and Research advisor at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), where she specialised in the monitoring and evaluation of projects focused on human mobility. Her research interests include transnational families, care, migration governance and the temporalities of migration. Her doctoral research analyses how transnational Venezuelan families negotiate migration and care in contexts of political and economic uncertainty.
Olivia Petie
Olivia is an ESRC funded Doctoral Researcher at the University of Birmingham, based within the Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS). Olivia’s research examines hotels as a form of precarious accommodation for asylum seekers in the UK, and the relationship between hospitality and home. The research aims to understand how hospitality is or isn’t offered to asylum seekers in the UK through Home Office hotel accommodation; and the implications of living in such accommodation on the lives of asylum seekers as they establish ‘home’ in the UK. She has a BA in Combined Honours – Geography with English Literature, and an MA in Human Geography Research both from Newcastle University. Alongside her academic work, Olivia has over 7 years of experience working in applied social research and evaluation across the third and public sector. In her spare time Olivia supports Care4Calais with English classes and clothing distributions for asylum seekers living in hotel accommodation, and is a Trustee for the national refugee befriending charity, HostNation.
Paladia Ziss
Paladia is pursuing a PhD in Sociology/Social Policy at the University of Birmingham. In her PhD, she examines the politics of time in protracted displacement situations in select refugee-hosting communities in Germany and Turkey. Specifically, she is interested in how social relations between refugees and longer-term residents are shaped by temporal structures like temporary legal status, collective histories of migration and imagined futures. She is currently conducting field research in Germany and Turkey with refugee families that are spread across those two countries.
She is an interdisciplinary researcher with interests in gender, global-local connections and multiscalarity, and refugee and migration studies. She holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BSc in Human Sciences from University College London. Before she started her PhD she worked in development and humanitarian assistance in Turkey, Palestine and Germany for several years, specialising in the promotion of gender equality, conflict- and politically-sensitive programme design and implementation, 'refugee integration' and monitoring and evaluation.
Rama Hagos
Rama is a fifth-year PhD student in the Department of Sociology and the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. Her research draws on historical and contemporary data sources to understand differential patterns of immigrant integration over time in the United States and internationally across a range of health, economic, and social outcomes. Her dissertation focuses on the integration patterns of a broad definition of migrants and their descendants in the early 20th century and the contemporary period, with a particular emphasis on how gender and race influences these integration patterns. Before attending Princeton, Rama worked as a research assistant on large-scale early childhood evaluation studies at the social policy firm MDRC. She graduated from Amherst College with a B.A. in Anthropology/Sociology, where she wrote her thesis on media representations of welfare-poor women historically in the United States.
Sarah Bruhn
Sarah is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Visiting Fellow at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development. Her research broadly examines how immigration and education policies are experienced by immigrant children and families in geographically specific ways, shaping their opportunities for inclusion in the United States. Her book project, Fragile Belonging: How Immigrant Women Resist Displacement, examines how Latina immigrant mothers navigate racialized federal immigration policies, local sanctuary ordinances, and gendered family roles, while contending with gentrifying neighborhoods. Her research has been published in Teachers College Record, the Harvard Educational Review, Journal of Marriage and Family, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and the Journal of Social Issues (find out more about her research). Sarah received her PhD from Harvard University. Prior to graduate school, she taught kindergarten and third grade in a two-way immersion dual language program in a public school in Washington, DC, and middle and high school English in Dearborn Heights, Michigan.
Siyue Lena Wang
Siyue Lena Wang is a doctoral student at the School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She earned her BA in Linguistics and Psychology and a Master of Education, both from UCLA. Lena specializes in the intersections of race, immigration, and higher education. Her dissertation delves into how race and immigration interplay, influencing the college experiences and persistence of undocumented Asian students. She employs multi-site critical ethnography to explore how higher educational institutions address racialized illegality within their daily discourse, practices, and programs. Her research also sheds light on the potential oversight in spaces and policies tailored for undocumented students, overlooking the rich diversity of student backgrounds. In doing so, her research offers both practical and theoretical insights beneficial for practitioners, academicians, and policymakers alike. As a first-generation college student, immigrant, educator, and community advocate, is profoundly committed to researching and training to uplift the lived experiences of undocumented Asian students and those who were formerly incarcerated through her collaboration with Immigrants Rising, UCLA Labor Center, and various undocumented youth-led organizations.
Stacey Bevan
Stacey is a Ph.D. Candidate in the School of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research centers immigrant wellness, children and structural contributions to mental health disparities. Her dissertation investigates the discrepancy between exposures known to contribute to developmental-behavioral concerns in children and access to medical diagnoses that qualify families for community-based services. Stacey maintains a practice as a pediatric registered nurse and collaborates with clinical researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Stacey holds a BSN in Nursing from Penn and a dual BS in International Relations and Biology from Tufts University. Her scholarship is supported by The Rita and Alex Hillman Foundation program for Nursing Innovation and Institute of Education Sciences.
Swan Ye Htut
Swan Ye Htut (he/him) is a Sociology PhD student at Stanford University, with research interests encompassing social movements, immigration, and race/ethnicity. He has published research on post-coup Myanmar digital activism and is conducting a project focused on the Myanmar diaspora in the US, exploring how ethnic and racial understandings from the home context impact ethnic and racial identification in the host context. He is also a graduate research assistant in the Immigration Policy Lab where he works with the GeoMatch project and the Qualitative Initiative. He conducts interviews with refugees in the US to enhance the resettlement process. Swan is a Graduate Public Service Fellow at Stanford and received a B.A. in Sociology and Global Studies from UCLA.
Tsveta Dobreva
Tsveta Dobreva is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Her research interests are in immigration, race and ethnicity, education, children of immigrants, and qualitative methods. Her current research examines how Latinx children of immigrants in New York State experience and navigate racialization across educational settings. She looks at how their experiences of racialization vary by skin tone and how they navigate these experiences and negotiate their identities and belonging in the US, particularly through strategic self-presentation and adjustment of their appearance, in a time of heightened anti-Latinx rhetoric. She has also been involved in ongoing research as a fellow with the Institute on Immigrant Integration Research and Policy at the Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, New York.
Tsveta holds an MSc in Migration and Ethnic Studies from the University of Amsterdam and a BA in Psychology from Ramapo College of New Jersey. Prior to beginning her graduate studies, she worked with asylum seekers in her native Bulgaria.
