Ilana Roginsky
My research will investigate the complex, divergent and rapidly evolving Jewish political ferment in the pre-war period which found a sudden end and offers a foil to the impression of modern Jewish thought and identity as a united monolith especially with the development of the state of Israel. I will explore this question through the primary source material from the autobiographical contests held in the 1930s by YIVO( or the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut) in Vilna, which were halted abruptly on September 1, 1939, the day that the winners of the […]
John Hu
My research examines how algorithmic pricing influences labor supply in gig economy platforms like Uber. When demand is high, Uber raises prices through “surge pricing” to attract more drivers. While economic theory predicts that higher pay should increase labor supply, it is unclear whether these price incentives actually bring more drivers onto the platform or simply shift existing drivers across locations. Using publicly available ride-hailing data from New York City, I will analyze how trip activity changes across neighborhoods and time periods with different demand conditions. By focusing on dense […]
Brigette Amaya
The history of indigenous people in El Salvador is marked by state violence and deliberate erasure. The 1932 La Matanza massacre, where 10,000–30,000 indigenous people were killed by the Salvadoran military, established the narrative that declared El Salvador a mestizo state with no living indigenous population. This erasure was intentional and enforced through terror. Survivors had to abandon visible markers of identity to avoid further persecution. Consequently, academia has failed to acknowledge how indigenous communities have survived, organized, and ultimately secured constitutional recognition in 2014. My project on indigenous recognition […]
Holly Abercrombie
Emotion plays a powerful role in shaping how we think, yet we all differ in how much our logic is swayed by our feelings. Although research shows that emotion can both help and hinder our cognition, we don’t fully understand why some people are more vulnerable to these effects than others. One potential factor is emotion-related impulsivity—the tendency to act reflexively rather than deliberately when experiencing strong emotions. My project examines how this impulsivity shapes analogical reasoning, which is our ability to recognize patterns and apply past knowledge to new […]
Andre Medina
Does hosting the FIFA World Cup provide a genuine economic catalyst or merely a temporary spike followed by fiscal contraction? Economists continue to debate whether such large-scale public expenditure is justified: supporters argue local economic growth will be stimulated and jobs will be created, while critics contend that economic gains are temporary and insufficient to justify the public costs. This project utilizes a Difference-in-Differences (DiD) research design to compare 12 Brazilian host municipalities with 12 matched non-host control cities from 2010–2019. By analyzing log-transformed municipal GDP and employment data from […]
Joshi Ashwin
America’s aging population requires unprecedented investment in senior housing, necessitating deep public-private collaboration. However, a critical data gap currently hinders this partnership: federal databases track clinical outcomes but struggle to map the multi-layered financial architectures that fund these facilities. This disconnect prevents policymakers and operators from understanding how capital allocation directly influences clinical stability. To bridge this divide, my research engineers a novel, open-source dataset. By merging federal healthcare records (CMS) with institutional transaction data, this project creates a high-fidelity crosswalk linking capital structures to site-level staffing and care metrics. […]
Lauren Lee
Why do some people seem “too distant” in relationships, while others feel “too clingy?” Who decides what levels of intimacy are “secure” as opposed to “insecure?” How might different cultures shape what it means to experience love, depend on others, and express emotion? Attachment theory is traditionally framed as the bond between early caregivers and children that shapes relationships across the lifespan, often assuming that these patterns are universal. I challenge this assumption sociologically by asking: How do collectivist and individualist contexts shape individual experiences of attachment, if at all? […]
Ruoyiyi Li
In 1968, a global left-wing revolution ignited all over the world. Young students holding the flags of revolution stood at the frontier of this global upheaval. How and why did these revolutions happen simultaneously and similarly? I argue that a transnational information network of student movements existed behind these events. In this project, I focus on how specific protest tactics and revolutionary terms transformed as they moved between two key hubs: Berkeley and West Berlin. To reconstruct this revolutionary information network, I will research the underground publications of student organizations […]
Ryan Rinerson
Hawaiʻi Sign Language (HSL) is the indigenous sign language of the Hawaiian Islands. It has been critically endangered since 1939, when American Sign displaced HSL use at the school for the Deaf on Oʻahu. In 2013, researchers in association with the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa pioneered HSL documentation, creating several revitalization lessons and starter HSL-English book dictionaries. Large-scale language documentation has not continued since the end of the initial project and HSL is in immediate need of further preservation. My SURF project will advance HSL documentation through collecting linguistic, […]
Sandra Ding
Bilingual children often face a hidden crisis in our education system: when they struggle to read, it is hard to tell if they are simply learning a new language or if they have a learning disability like dyslexia. For Chinese American students, this confusion often leads to a wait-to-fail approach, where genuine reading struggles are dismissed as temporary language barriers or misidentified as behavioral issues. This delays critical early intervention and causes deep academic and emotional distress for children. My SURF project addresses this gap by developing an evidence-based Bilingual […]