Student

Reiley Reed

Reiley Reed is a PhD candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare. Her research interests include the pregnancy surveillance and criminalization, and the historical and ongoing role of social work in perpetuating reproductive oppression. Reiley’s mixed methods dissertation research explores social workers’ experiences with and perceptions of reporting abortion and substance use in pregnancy to government authorities. Reiley received her Master of Public Health and Master of Social Welfare from UC Berkeley and her BA in Psychology from UC Santa...

Sarah Lee

Sarah Lee is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Berkeley, studying modern America with a focus on spatial and carceral California history. Her dissertation, "To Control the Law of Fresno: Police, Race, and Space in California’s Central Valley," examines how police professionalization and segregation developed in rural California in the 20th century through a case study of her hometown, Fresno, California.

Sebastián Puerta

2025-2026 BELS Fellow

Sebastián Puerta is a PhD student in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus on labor economics, industrial organization, and political economy. He also serves as a Head Steward for UAW 4811, the union representing academic workers at the University of California. His academic research investigates the mechanisms of union power and their impact on workplace outcomes, aiming to understand how unions mobilize members, secure workplace improvements, and thrive in contemporary society. Previously, Sebastián received a B.A...

Silvia Fregoni

Silvia Fregoni is a Lloyd M. Robbins JSD Fellow and 2022 Miller-ASIL Fellow at UC Berkeley School of Law. Fregoni’s research focuses on corporate law, law and economics, and international law. She has a particular interest in applying social science and quantitative research methods to explore a variety of topics in these areas, such as the...

Alinaya Sybilla Fabros

PhD Candidate
Sociology

Alinaya Fabros is a PhD candidate in Sociology studying labor globalization, political economy and transnational social reproduction. Her dissertation examines how a transnational working class is formed and maintained across generations, with a rare comparative analysis of the Philippine state's labor emigration policy and its village-level implementation since the 1974 New Labor Code--the law often cited for producing the most globalized labor force on the planet and generating the emigration governance model currently replicated in developing countries worldwide. Prior to entering...

Tamara Zeina Jamil

BELS Fellow

Tamara Zeina Jamil is a PhD Candidate in Geography at UC Berkeley. With prior experience as a Researcher with Forensic Architecture, her work focuses on the politics of architecture and the built environment. Her ongoing research applies mixed-media methods to study the relationships between carcerality, toxicity, and aesthetics.

Karen Villegas

BELS Fellow

Karen Villegas is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley. Karen’s dissertation analyzes the ways in which economic and language ideologies work together to socialize aspiring U.S. citizens to be literate in a ‘neoliberal’ ideation of citizenship. The context of the study is an adult, English as a Second Language (ESL), citizenship course with a focus on the social organization of the practices, the ideologies indexed in these practices, and the ensuing formations of literacies produced in these settings. Karen received her M.A...

Violet Spurlock

2025-2026 BELS Fellow

Violet Spurlock is a PhD student in the Department of English, with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. Her dissertation research examines discourses of obviousness in literature and literary criticism alongside the development of the non-obviousness requirement in US patent law, positing a connection between the aesthetic category of obviousness and legal categories of intellectual property. Expanding on legal arguments about the unique eligibility of non-obvious ideas to serve as intellectual property, her research argues that critics' aesthetic judgments of non-...

Yael Plitmann

Yael Plitmann is a PhD candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at UC Berkeley. She studies the intersection of education, religion and organizations, and combines sociological research methods and organizational theory with perspectives from law and the humanities. Yael holds degrees from Tel Aviv university and Yale law school.

Yen-Tung Lin

Yen-Tung Lin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the University of California, Berkeley. He researches how international human rights law shapes the use of solitary confinement in three penal regimes: Taiwan, Denmark, and California, relying primarily on in-depth interviews with activists, lawyers, political leaders, and prison staff on how they make sense of human rights law, and what effects the law eventually has. Before becoming a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley in 2018, he obtained an MA in sociology and worked as a...