Author: Sean Collins

Economics’ unlimited potential

Post author By Sean Collins
Post date November 2, 2026

Christine Byrd for UC Irvine School of Social Sciences

When Derek Tran, M.S. ’21, Ph.D. ’24, started graduate school at UC Irvine, he expected to become a professor.

Instead, his career has taken him from publishing academic research to working for Amazon – one of the world’s largest private employers of Ph.D. economists – to a fast-growing AI-powered lending company. Along the way, he discovered something he hadn’t expected: an economics Ph.D. can take you almost anywhere.

“Eighty percent of what I use day-to-day in a job like this comes from the knowledge gained from the Ph.D. program, whether it’s causal, Bayesian or structural economics,” says Tran. “Personally, I think economics is the best degree to get. You could argue for computer science or AI, but econ gives you an understanding of the world you can’t get anywhere else.”

Pursuing his potential

Tran moved to California from Vietnam when he was six. After graduating from UC Merced, he put his bachelor’s in applied mathematics to good use working on real estate analytics for a financial services company in Newport Beach. But he was bored.

“This was not where I thought my potential ended,” Tran recalls. So he started applying to economics graduate programs. He was unsure of exactly what he wanted to research, but he found that matters less than having a drive to succeed. “When I got to UC Irvine, I met professors who helped change my idea of what I wanted to study.”

One of those was his advisor, Guillaume Rocheteau, professor of economics and an expert in monetary economics and theory. Tran thought he might follow in Rocheteau’s footsteps and pursue economic theory, but the professor encouraged him to explore empirical economics for his third-year paper. That redirection ultimately changed Tran’s trajectory.

“To my view, he is an independent researcher who can come up with his own ideas. He was always willing to present his ideas in brownbag seminars and receive feedback,” says Rocheteau. Importantly, “he was open minded and accepted constructive criticisms to make his work better.”

Tran earned his master’s in economics in 2021 – which is offered to students in pursuit of the Ph.D. – and then turned his attention from equations and theories of economics, to measuring real-world impact of banking interventions.

Ultimately, Tran’s dissertation focused on the impact of recent central bank interventions, including the COVID-era Paycheck Protection Program. That research led to him presenting to members of the Bank of England at a conference in London, and to publishing a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Banking & Finance.

His paper showed that access to the Federal Reserve’s discount window provided large banks with crucial liquidity, thereby directly enhancing their capacity to disburse loans under the Paycheck Protection Program during the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike major financial events of the past that researchers had decades to examine, Tran seized the rare opportunity to be part of the first wave of research into contemporary fiscal policy.

Tran says that throughout the graduate program, he felt supported by his peers as well as his professors.

“UCI strikes a nice balance of being competitive but also having this support system. I always knew that my friends wanted me to succeed, and members from our cohort would hang out weekly at the bar or do club activities together,” Tran says. “The people, the connections – those would not have been the same in any other program.”

Plus, he loves the campus’s location. “UCI made me fall in love with Irvine as a city,” Tran says. The university remains an important part of his life for another reason: His wife, who he met at UC Merced, is an accountant at UC Irvine. He proposed as he was nearing the end of his graduate studies and she was working on campus.

Putting econ to work

During his penultimate year of the doctoral program, Tran responded to a department email sharing internship opportunities. He and one of his closest friends in the cohort, Parush Arora, Ph.D. ’24, both landed internships at Amazon and spent a summer in Seattle working for the retail giant. Tran ran a project estimating the economic impact of the “Fulfilled by Amazon” program which enables small businesses to have the company sell and ship their products with the idea that lower shipping costs and faster delivery create a net benefit to sellers.

After graduating, Tran returned full-time to Amazon, where he worked on optimizing seller fees in India, trying to strike the ideal balance for buyers, sellers and the company.

“Of course, students can enter an academic career,” says Rocheteau. “But there are many other exciting options outside of academia where the tools learnt in the Ph.D. are very valuable. It can be at consulting firms (several students received amazing offers this year), tech firms (like the firm where Derek is currently working at), finance industry and so on.”

For Tran, the vast array of opportunities to put his economics degree to work was a revelation.

“I thought I was going to go into academia, but the world outside of academia is so large for economics,” Tran says. “Economics builds the exact skillset you need to succeed as a data scientist, applied scientist, data analyst, or machine learning engineer. Even since I’ve graduated, I’ve had opportunities to combine causal inference using machine learning methods and state-of-the-art AI.”

Tran continues learning about and applying those emerging methods to his day-to-day work as a senior research scientist at Upstart. The publicly traded company originates billions of dollars of loans each month, focusing on borrowers who have been turned down for traditional loans. Tran designs experiments, builds models, and uses his well-honed intuition to contribute to a team that aims to improve financial inclusion.

“Credit is key to American success, and we use AI and alternative data to originate loans for qualified individuals who fall outside traditional banking criteria,” Tran says.

Tran says he uses his economics degree daily, doing research and considering new avenues to generate income for the company.

“Economics is so much more than what you’ve learned. It’s such a wide, wide field that gives you the tools to apply to AI, sociology, biology or whatever you like,” says Tran. “There is so much you can explore. Don’t be limited by what you think traditional economics is.”

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Housing the public good

Post author By Sean Collins
Post date October 29, 2026

Jill Kato for UC Irvine School of Social Sciences

“There’s only one thing that solves homelessness, and that’s housing,” says Deyanira Nevarez Martinez.

The UC Irvine alumna who earned her Ph.D. in urban and environmental planning and policy with an emphasis in Chicano/Latino studies in 2021 has spent much of her life studying the complicated systems that make housing difficult to secure in the first place. As an assistant professor at Michigan State University and a member of the Lansing City Council, Nevarez Martinez approaches housing as more than a policy issue. Instead, she views it as a foundation for civic participation, public health and community stability.

Her perspective is grounded as much in lived experience as it is in academic training. Her parents were migrant farmworkers and the family moved between California and Arizona. Nevarez Martinez grew up moving with the agricultural seasons, navigating unstable schooling and witnessing the realities of housing insecurity long before she had the language of urban planning to describe it.

Today, she studies homelessness and farmworker housing while helping shape policy in Lansing, Michigan, where she is one of four Chicanos serving on an eight-member city council in a city that is only about 13 percent Latino. For Nevarez Martinez, housing policy has never been just about buildings or zoning codes. It is about the lived realities of the people those systems affect.

“At a very young age, I realized there was a privilege that came with citizenship and being able to say things other people maybe wanted to say but couldn’t,” she says. “If there is a space where I can do some good, I’m going to get involved.”

Learning how systems shape lives

Nevarez Martinez spent her childhood between San Luis, Arizona, on the U.S.-Mexico border and Gilroy, California, known as the “garlic capital of the world.” Her family lived in a colonia, an informal settlement common along the U.S.-Mexico border, where basic infrastructure such as running water and paved roads was not always guaranteed. Until she was about 12 years old, the family migrated seasonally between the two communities. The movement shaped many aspects of her early life, especially her education.

She attended a different California school every year. Groups of migrant students often moved through school systems together, relocated from campus to campus depending on available resources and district decisions. Some children stayed mostly within their own circles, reluctant to form new friendships they would soon have to leave behind. Nevarez Martinez reacted differently.

“I think I had kind of the opposite reaction,” she says. “I wanted to meet as many people as possible because I knew I might only be there for a month.”

At home, education was understood as a pathway to a different kind of future. Nevarez Martinez remembers making a deal with her parents: if she earned good grades, she would not have to work in the fields. Her older brother occasionally joined their parents at work and would come home exhausted and sick after long days that started before dawn. His experience left a big impression.

“I took it so seriously I got a Ph.D.,” she says with a laugh.

But education represented more than economic mobility. It also became a way to better understand the systems shaping the communities around her. After earning a bachelor’s degree in political science at the University of Arizona, Nevarez Martinez worked in Arizona politics, including for Congressman Raúl Grijalva and later with organizations focused on civic engagement in Latino communities.

One experience, in particular, changed the trajectory of her career. While organizing voter outreach with Mi Familia Vota, canvassing teams repeatedly encountered neighborhoods that were physically difficult to access. Some were separated by freeways without pedestrian crossings. Others lacked sidewalks or flooded during storms. The obstacles revealed something she had not heard discussed in conversations about civic participation.

“We often think about barriers to civic engagement in sociological terms, like race, gender and class,” she says. “But we don’t think as much about the physical barriers to civic engagement.”

She began thinking about questions that urban planners confront every day: whether residents could safely walk to polling places, whether public transportation routes connected communities to essential services and who made decisions about sidewalks and infrastructure in the first place. Those questions led her toward studying urban planning.

Finding an intellectual home at UC Irvine

When Nevarez Martinez decided to pursue a Ph.D., she knew she wanted an academic environment where urban planning and Chicano/Latino studies could meaningfully intersect. That combination was rare.

After reaching out to pioneering Chicano studies scholar Rudy Acuña for guidance, she was directed to UC Irvine professor Rudy Torres, whose work connected both fields. The conversation eventually led Nevarez Martinez to UC Irvine, where she earned a Ph.D. in urban and environmental planning and policy in 2021, along with a concentration in Chicano/Latino studies.

Nevarez Martinez entered graduate school without initially envisioning a career in academia. Her training in urban planning was geared more toward practice than research, and for years she imagined herself working primarily as a planner.

“When I finished undergrad, I thought, ‘Thank God that’s over. I’m never doing that again,’” she says with a laugh. “Then four years later, I was getting a master’s degree. After my planning degree, I thought I was going to become a practicing planner. And then I ended up right back in school getting a Ph.D.”

What kept drawing her back, she says, was curiosity and the belief that education could amplify her ability to advocate for communities often excluded from policy conversations.

“Plus, I’m a lifelong learner,” she says.

At UC Irvine, that curiosity found a home. In addition to her work in the urban planning and public policy department, Nevarez Martinez found an important intellectual community through the university’s Chicano/Latino studies program, where students across disciplines grappled with questions of race, inequality and community life. Faculty members including Torres, Maria Rendón, Laura Enriquez and Belinda Campos became important mentors, helping shape the way she approached scholarship, teaching and community-engaged research.

UC Irvine also gave her something she now recognizes as especially important: representation. Nevarez Martinez is currently the only Latina in the School of Planning, Design and Construction at Michigan State University. If she earns tenure next year, she will become the first Latina to do so in the school’s history. The contrast has deepened her appreciation for the mentorship and visibility she experienced at UC Irvine.

“In Irvine, I had the benefit of seeing people like my advisors,” she says. “Those role models don’t exist in all places.”

Housing as public service

Nevarez Martinez originally planned to study informal settlements along the U.S.-Mexico border for her dissertation, drawing in part from her own experiences growing up in a colonia. But the COVID-19 pandemic forced her research in a different direction.

After receiving approval for fieldwork in February 2020, university shutdowns and travel restrictions made it impossible to continue the multi-site ethnography she had designed. Instead, she focused her dissertation on homelessness in Orange County, conducting research while also helping run a meal program for unhoused residents through the nonprofit Housing Is a Human Right OC. Her resulting dissertation became one of the few recent academic studies focused specifically on homelessness in Orange County, an issue often overshadowed by attention on Los Angeles and the Bay Area in this state.

On the Lansing City Council, Nevarez Martinez has worked on housing initiatives that include a modular transitional housing community for unhoused residents and policies designed to encourage affordable housing development. Her urban planning background gives her fluency in the technical language of zoning, land use and development incentives, the policies that shape everyday life in cities. But she also approaches those policies through the lens of someone who understands housing instability firsthand.

The child of farmworkers who once moved between migrant camps is now leading a major state-funded study on farmworker housing in Michigan. Supported by an $800,000 grant, the project examines the housing, labor and economic conditions of migrant and seasonal farmworkers across the state. The project connects directly to the communities that shaped her own childhood.

Nevarez Martinez also sees mentorship as part of that work. She serves as a faculty advisor to several student organizations, including groups supporting Latino students and students of color. She hopes students who see her “walking the halls” recognize that there is space for them in academia and public life too. She hopes representation shapes what students believe is possible.

The child who negotiated her way out of the fields by promising good grades has kept that promise many times over. Now she is negotiating something larger: what it looks like to build cities that leave fewer people behind.

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The places that change you

Post author By Sean Collins
Post date October 28, 2026

Jill Kato for UC Irvine School of Social Sciences

When Temitope Famodu was 10 years old, a classmate in England asked them a question they had never heard before.

“If I go to America, will I get as dark as you?”

The question caught them off guard. Until then, Famodu had never thought of their identity as something that needed explaining. Growing up in a suburb of Minneapolis-St. Paul, Famodu had spent much of their early childhood surrounded by their Nigerian American family and community. Their father immigrated from Nigeria. Their mother is from Minnesota. But a two-year move to England at the age of ten exposed them to new perspectives on race, identity and belonging.

At a small Church of England primary school, Famodu and their younger brothers were among the few Black students and the only mixed-race family in the area. Their classmates were curious about their appearance and American accents. For a time, the siblings even tried to adopt British accents in an effort to fit in.

Until then, Famodu had taken for granted the world they knew. In England, they began to see that people’s understanding of race, identity and the United States depended on their vantage point. They also began to see how the same person could be understood differently in different places. That insight stayed with them long after their family returned to Minnesota. It would eventually become the thread connecting their studies, their research and their journey to UC Irvine’s global studies Ph.D. program. Famodu’s search for answers ultimately took them back to Europe, where, with support from a Fulbright scholarship, they examined how African students navigate identity and belonging in Hungary.

What distance reveals

As an undergraduate at DePaul University, Famodu majored in international studies. By their senior year, they had spent three years grappling with questions about how knowledge is produced and how place shapes people’s understanding of history, identity and culture. But they wanted to experience those questions from somewhere else.

“I wanted to think about those issues from outside of the U.S., outside of Chicago,” they say.

Famodu initially considered studying abroad in the United Kingdom. But Hungary offered a practical advantage. The program cost about $10,000 less for the year. Famodu decided to study there. The decision would prove consequential. Years later, Famodu would describe this approach as “the fling method.”

“I kind of just flung myself over there,” they say. “I thought, at best, I will make friends, and I’d enjoy it, at worst, I’d learn something about a new place and about myself.”

Unlike many of their classmates, Famodu could not afford frequent weekend trips across Europe. Instead, they spent much of their time in Hungary, building relationships with local residents and developing a deeper understanding of a place they knew little about before arriving. At the time, they had no idea the experience would eventually become the foundation of their dissertation.

Questions of scale

After receiving their undergraduate degree, Famodu worked in nonprofit organizations serving refugees and students in Chicago. The work was meaningful, but they found themself preoccupied by larger structural questions. They wanted to understand the forces shaping displacement, migration and inequality. Why were people moving to the U.S.? How did global politics shape local experiences? What could organizations realistically accomplish within larger systems?

“I wasn’t satisfied with just responding to the global crises I had learned so much about. I wanted to get at the origins and understand how and why these decades-long issues persisted,” they say. “I was young, I was fired up, and I imagined different futures were possible.”

As they gained experience, Famodu began to see the possibilities, as well as the limits of nonprofit work. Many of the problems that concerned them were larger and more deeply rooted than any single organization could solve. One of their undergraduate mentors encouraged them to consider graduate school and pointed them toward the relatively new doctoral program in global studies at UC Irvine.

“This is actually the only program that I applied for,” they say. “I was not certain that I wanted to go to graduate school until I was introduced to this program. It felt like a good fit.”

That confidence grew after a lengthy conversation with Yousuf Al-Bulushi, who would become their advisor and is an associate professor in the Department of Global and International Studies.

“I am so lucky to have met Dr. Al-Bulushi,” Famodu says. “I really admire his pedagogical approach that is both encouraging and intellectually rigorous. I am still learning from him and look forward to continuing to do so as I embark on my own teaching journey.”

Though Hungary was not his area of expertise, Al-Bulushi encouraged Famodu to follow their questions wherever they led. He challenged them to think seriously about the connections between their own experiences abroad, emerging scholarship on Black Europe and broader questions of migration, race and identity. In doing so, he helped them identify a research project that reflected both intellectual interests and the transdisciplinary approach that drew them to UC Irvine in the first place.

Returning to Hungary

Famodu entered graduate school interested in technology supply chains, Black geographies and the relationship between resource extraction in Africa and global capitalism. But their research eventually took a different direction. As they encountered scholarship on Black Europe, they noticed that much of the literature focused on Western Europe and former colonial powers. This led them to begin thinking again about their own experience studying abroad in Hungary.

“Understanding of Black identity and placemaking in Eastern Europe and the post-socialist context wasn’t as researched and discussed,” they say.

Famodu developed a dissertation that earned additional momentum when they received a Fulbright award and spent the 2024-25 academic year in Hungary as a Fulbright scholar and John Lewis Civil Rights Fellow, conducting fieldwork in Budapest and Debrecen.

Al-Bulushi describes Famodu’s dissertation as examining the intersection of African migration, authoritarianism and Black geographies in Eastern Europe.

“Why, at a time of rising authoritarianism, racism and anti-migrant sentiment, was a country like Hungary increasingly recruiting international university students from African countries like Nigeria?” he says.

Famodu’s interviews revealed how students navigated questions of race, visibility and belonging. Many described being stared at in public because they looked different from the local population. Others spoke about the practical challenges of temporary visas, rising housing costs and uncertain futures. Famodu describes these challenges as part of what it means to be “Black in the Bloc,” a phrase that captures the particular experience of African students navigating race and visibility in post-socialist Eastern Europe.

Yet Famodu also found stories of community. Students created informal networks of care through churches, friendships and student organizations. In the absence of robust institutional support, they often relied on one another. Those experiences became central to their understanding of how people sustain everyday life far from home.

Understanding a complex world

For Famodu, understanding the world means looking at how history, politics, culture and everyday life intersect. That is what they value most about global and international studies.

“What I love about it is that it’s transdisciplinary,” they say. “I think that is the best way to approach learning about anything, especially in a time of multiple crises.”

Al-Bulushi agrees and says their dissertation reflects exactly what the program strives for.

“It is methodologically unique, theoretically inspiring and empirically rich,” he says. “This is everything an advisor could ask for, and it is beautifully emblematic of the transdisciplinary and transgressive research program that we insist global studies Ph.D. students to pursue.”

Famodu’s research touches on migration, race, education, nationalism, identity and political economy. Examining any one of those subjects in isolation would miss the larger picture. The same approach shapes their teaching. As a teaching assistant, they have enjoyed helping students understand how contemporary issues emerge from longer historical processes and overlapping social forces.

“I wish that global studies was a standard pedagogical orientation because I think it helps to deepen understanding in any line of educational inquiry,” they say.

Famodu successfully defended their dissertation in May and graduated in June. They plan to pursue academic positions while transforming their dissertation into a book-length manuscript. The foundation and expertise they have gained as a Ph.D. student at UC Irvine are unlikely to lose their urgency.

“My skill set will always be relevant, no matter what industry or place I end up in,” they say. “I think we will always need to examine how power operates on a global scale by centering the lived-experiences of people who have been structurally dispossessed.”

The questions that first emerged when Famodu was a 10-year-old in England continue to guide their work. What began as an effort to understand how people see one another across cultures has evolved into a body of work devoted to understanding how people navigate difference, build community and make sense of the world around them.

“We need people to be thinking and taking care of one another,” Famodu says. “Otherwise, there is no future.”

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A life in dialogue

Post author By Sean Collins
Post date October 28, 2026

Jill Kato for UC Irvine School of Social Sciences

Most people would do almost anything to avoid standing in the middle of a room where 90 people are shouting at each other. For Johanna Solomon, this is an environment that feels, if not comfortable, then deeply purposeful.

“I was born to be in the middle of that level of chaos,” she says, laughing at the realization.

For Solomon, who earned her Ph.D. at UC Irvine in political science in 2015 and who is now an assistant professor at Kent State University in the School of Peace and Conflict Studies, conflict has never been something to avoid. It is a place where people confront their own assumptions and sometimes change their minds. Across a career devoted to dialogue, mediation and peace building, Solomon has built her work around the central belief that lasting solutions only emerge when people are willing to listen across difference.

The making of a peace builder

That instinct began long before she arrived at UC Irvine. Growing up in New Hope, Pennsylvania, Solomon lived in what she describes as a loud Jewish household where debate was a form of connection rather than tension.

“Debate is baked into how you are supposed to learn,” she says. “Questioning ideas and defending your perspective are part of how people engage with one another.”

Listening closely to opposing perspectives became second nature. So did trying to find common ground. Some of that instinct was nurtured by the culture she grew up in. Some of it, Solomon suspects, was simply innate.

She describes herself as a natural collaborator. “I really enjoy listening to different perspectives,” she says.

Solomon traces many of her earliest ideas about justice and responsibility back to her grandmother, who lived with her family while she was growing up. Her grandmother was a nurse with a master’s degree at a time when few women held advanced degrees and later directed a nursing school in New York during the civil rights era. At one point, she was instructed to admit only white women into the program.

“She just said no,” Solomon says.

The story became foundational to Solomon’s understanding of power, responsibility and moral courage.

“She instilled this idea of using your privilege and power to make sure that other people had equal access and had an equal chance,” Solomon says.

As an undergraduate, Solomon initially planned to pursue psychiatry. At the University of Chicago, she studied comparative human development, an interdisciplinary program blending anthropology, psychology, biology and political theory. She became fascinated by how humans organize themselves into groups and how systems of power shape identity and behavior. At the time, she worked with youth with gang involvement in an alternative behavioral school with self-harm or psycho-affective challenges.

After earning her undergraduate degree, Solomon attended Northwestern University, where she completed a master’s degree in counseling psychology specializing in children and adolescents. During that program she worked at an inpatient alternative placement for youth navigating mental health challenges, addiction and frequent court involvement. Many had gang ties. The experience deepened her understanding of how social structures shape the choices available to people.

“I came to really admire the kids I worked with and realize how smart they were, and how deeply society and power shaped the choices they believed were available to them,” she says.

The work also revealed something else. She enjoyed facilitating groups more than working one-on-one. She found herself drawn not only to individual healing but to the dynamics between communities.

Discovering dialogue at UC Irvine

At UC Irvine, Solomon found a program flexible enough to hold an interest not contained by a single discipline. The Ph.D. program in political science, ranked among the top 20 at public universities, offered the intellectual range for her to pursue psychology as well. She also found a place where her interests in power and identity converged. The Center for Citizen Peacebuilding brought faculty, students and community members together. It supported programs for citizen peacebuilding, including student researchers like Solomon. There she was able to experience the community and mentorship of the other board members

The center also supported a pioneering experiential learning program that brought together Jewish, Muslim, Arab and other students to study the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and travel together throughout the Middle East. Participants, including Solomon, met with community leaders, visited refugee camps and spent countless hours processing difficult conversations as a group.

At first, Solomon approached dialogue work skeptically. She thought it had some promise, but she had some doubts as to whether it would really work. Over time, that skepticism faded.

“The more intergroup dialogue organizations I got to meet and learn about, the more I became convinced that it is the only thing that works,” she says.

Her dissertation research focused on dialogue and identity formation, using experiences from both UCI and the Los Angeles-based Muslim-Jewish organization New Ground as case studies. She examined how people from deeply different backgrounds navigate difficult conversations without erasing disagreement.

“I need to hear all these perspectives in order to solve these problems,” Solomon says. “You can’t pressure people into solutions they don’t truly believe in. That only creates stalemate. I believe in long-term solutions.”

That philosophy became central not only to her scholarship, but to the way she approaches teaching, facilitation and leadership.

Mentors who modeled humanity

Solomon speaks about UC Irvine mentors with the kind of affection usually reserved for close family friends.

“Daniel Brunstetter and David Snow were absolutely amazing researchers, but also really genuine, warm, helpful humans,” she says.

She credits them with helping her learn how to write, publish and think critically about difficult topics while also modeling empathy, generosity and intellectual openness.

Brunstetter, in particular, remains an important figure in her life and career. She admired the way he treated graduate students as emerging colleagues rather than passive learners.

“Daniel continues to be a mentor,” Solomon says. “He really sees the humanity in everyone.”

She also points to the influence of professor Paula Garb, who introduced her to mediation work and the Alternatives to Violence Project, which helped shape her path into alternative dispute resolution.

Outside the classroom, Solomon found mentors throughout the broader Center for Citizen Peacebuilding community. Faculty opened their homes, community members hosted students for dinners and conversations, and relationships stretched beyond academic boundaries.

“It was transformative to see that community members cared that much about connecting and humanizing people,” she says.

Those experiences reinforced a lesson Solomon still carries into her own classrooms today, that intellectual work and human care are inseparable.

Beyond stalemate

Now a faculty member at Kent State University, Solomon continues to teach dialogue, mediation and conflict resolution while facilitating community-based initiatives across political, religious and cultural divides.

Her work often begins with practical, everyday concerns rather than sweeping ideological debates. In Akron’s North Hill neighborhood, one community dialogue project revealed tensions among longtime residents and newly arrived refugee populations. Solomon initially expected conversations to focus on crime or cultural conflict. Instead, residents discovered a surprisingly universal frustration.

Potholes.

Not ordinary potholes, but massive craters nearly three feet deep. They had become a source of tension in the neighborhood, with residents from different cultural backgrounds responding in different ways — driving on sidewalks, veering into opposite lanes or avoiding roads altogether. Through facilitated dialogue, residents realized they shared the same problem. And together, they organized and pushed local officials to fix it.

Another breakthrough came through food. During one session, an older white restaurant owner who had spoken critically about immigrant communities spent lunch eating churros and Nepali food prepared by immigrant-owned businesses. By the end of the event, he was offering to help those same business owners navigate local regulations and paperwork. For Solomon, moments like those reveal the power of humanization.

That work feels especially urgent in a deeply polarized political climate. Although she is invested in brokering conversations, Solomon does not romanticize it or mistake it for an instant solution. She speaks candidly about her fears regarding political extremism, democratic erosion and increasing social fragmentation. Still, she finds hope in smaller moments, especially in the classroom.

“People actually care about a lot of the same things,” she says. “They may just listen to different sources of media.”

She does not pretend dialogue can solve everything. But after years spent studying identity, mediation and conflict, she remains convinced that long-term solutions require people to stay in the room with one another.

After all, Solomon has always been drawn to the middle of the conversation. Not because conflict is comfortable, but because it is where people learn, challenge one another and sometimes change. For Johanna Solomon, that possibility is always worth staying for.

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A path to justice

Post author By Sean Collins
Post date October 27, 2026

Christine Byrd for UC Irvine School of Social Sciences

While doing field work in Cambodia, Jen Zelnick, Ph.D. ’22 discovered her colleagues had been keeping a secret. The revelation would set her research on an entirely new path.

As a Luce Scholar, Zelnick spent a year in Southeast Asia working with a small public health organization exchanging needles and syringes to prevent the spread of HIV. She practiced her skills in the native Khmer language on a daily basis. Then, one day she walked into a meeting where, to her surprise, her Cambodian coworkers were conversing in perfect English.

“We’re all from California,” they explained. “But your boss said not to tell you.”

They were among a few hundred people who had been deported from the U.S. after living there for decades. Right away, Zelnick knew that this unique population would be the subject of her future dissertation – she just needed to get into graduate school first.

Pursuing that goal would take her to Chicago, Irvine and back to Cambodia to earn her Ph.D. before accepting a role at the State Bar of California where she could apply the lessons from those experiences to expand access to justice at home.

‘True collegiality’

Zelnick had been interested in anthropology since she was a high school student in New Jersey. While earning her bachelor’s in anthropology from Haverford College, she did undergraduate research in Indonesia and then completed the yearlong Luce Scholars program in Cambodia. When it came time to apply to graduate school, she was disappointed that no doctoral programs accepted her – but she eventually came to see that as a positive.

“UC Irvine hadn’t been on my radar when I first applied to grad school,” Zelnick says. But while earning her master’s at the University of Chicago in 2014, faculty including Justin Richland who is now professor and chair of the anthropology department at UC Irvine, pointed her to the sunny Southern California campus. Zelnick learned about UC Irvine anthropology professors including Susan Coutin, Eleana Kim and Leo Chavez, who study immigration from different angles – and all of whom eventually served on her dissertation committee. Zelnick realized that “UC Irvine just made sense when you looked at it.”

“For me, it was important to find professors who triangulated my project quite well,” she says. “I know I wouldn’t have gotten that elsewhere — because I looked.”

At UC Irvine, Zelnick received prestigious dissertation grants from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, The Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Center for Khmer Studies, and the Center for Engaged Scholarship. At every step, she says she felt supported by her faculty advisors, especially Kim.

“Eleana really helped me understand how to write a grant and how to be responsive,” Zelnick says. “She helped me get my first peer reviewed journal article published and showed a lot of care for what I needed as a student and as a person.”

Zelnick also bonded with her cohort and was part of a trio of anthropology graduate students who visited each other during their fieldwork in Asia, and later served as bridesmaids in each other’s weddings.

“The cohort and the professors I worked with were incredibly supportive. I know from friends who went to grad school elsewhere that was not their experience,” Zelnick says. “True collegiality really, really, made the UC Irvine program worthwhile for me.”

Life after deportation

With funding for nearly two years of fieldwork, Zelnick explored whether people who committed a crime in the U.S. and were then deported to Cambodia, went on to build successful lives. Her research found that deported individuals are much more likely to be incarcerated and die prematurely – but those statistics are not destiny.

“There are people who really do find success after being convicted of a serious crime in the U.S. and serving their sentence, who become teachers, build families and become models in their communities.”

Working at a non-governmental organization that helped deportees acclimate upon arrival in Cambodia, Zelnick provided orientation to newcomers stepping off the plane from the U.S., and visited groups as they settled into the country to ensure their basic needs were being met.

One of her papers, published in the peer-reviewed Political and Legal Anthropology Review, examined the delicate bureaucratic dance between governments that was necessary to create Cambodian citizenship for the individuals being deported from the U.S. – many of whom had been born in refugee camps in Thailand during the Khmer Rouge regime and had no legal ties to their ancestors’ homeland.

During her graduate studies, Zelnick worked with some civil legal aid organizations in California that provided defense to people facing deportation, where civil immigration law intersects with criminal courts. This put Zelnick in the center of “access to justice” work, which aims to provide legal aid and equitable access to the legal system to everyone regardless of their background, wealth, age, race or gender.

Access to justice

That work laid the groundwork for Zelnick’s career with the State Bar of California. Although she had originally planned to pursue a professorship, an autoimmune disease diagnosed during her graduate studies would limit future fieldwork, making it hard to continue international research. So she pivoted, applying to jobs in policy, legal organizations and government, ultimately finding an opportunity in the State Bar’s Office of Access and Inclusion that suited her experience with grant applications and reporting, as well as her familiarity with local legal aid organizations.

“Keep an open mind. I was the odd duck whose project did not change since before I started grad school, but my career trajectory has changed and I’m really glad that it did,” says Zelnick. “I take a lot of pride in the work I do, I find it very meaningful and fulfilling.”

Now a principal program analyst, Zelnick manages a small team of Ph.D. researchers working toward that goal. Last year, her team launched the Legal Aid Justice Technology Collaborative to ensure that the state bar’s legal aid program grantees are equipped to use technology including AI in responsible and ethical ways to expand their reach and legal support. Earlier this year, they launched the California Access and Inclusion Lab, to bring together research, policy recommendations and programming to support legal aid for immigration, housing and especially in rural parts of the state.

She also researches and monitors regulatory reform, including an order from the Supreme Court of California that would allow people who had some legal training, but are not full-fledged lawyers, to provide some limited advice on a pro-bono basis to people who don’t have representation for civil cases – which can include bankruptcy, child custody and immigration.

Leveraging their backgrounds in the social sciences, Zelnick and her team have created policy recommendations for the California legislature, including a proposal in 2025 that led to $25 million to support immigration legal services – with $10 million going to the State Bar’s grantees.

This year, when she co-presented a briefing on a five-year report on the impact of the Legal Services Trust Fund Commission, which distributes grants to civil legal aid organizations, elected officials, local government staff, lawyers and academics attended. Among the audience was one of Zelnick’s former advisors, UC Irvine anthropologist Susan Coutin, underscoring the connection between academia and policy, from Cambodia to California.

“Our office’s mission is guided by principles of increasing access to the legal system for all Californians,” says Zelnick. “That’s something that has been important to me for a very long time.”

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Learning how the mind makes meaning

Post author By Sean Collins
Post date October 26, 2026

Jill Kato for UC Irvine School of Social Sciences

When Jiaxuan Li describes her research, she often begins with a mistake.

Take the sentence “The storyteller could turn any incident into an amusing antidote.” Most would pause briefly before subconsciously correcting “antidote” to “anecdote.” Others might not notice the error at all. A few might register it, and then maybe assume the unusual wording was intentional.

For Li, those split-second responses offer a window into how the human mind works.

“People encounter mistakes or inconsistencies in language all the time,” she says. “Our brains are constantly adapting to make sense of them.”

Li, who earned her Ph.D. in language science from UC Irvine in March, has spent the last five years studying what happens when the brain encounters those moments of confusion. Her dissertation examined what are called “hallucinations” in language comprehension, or moments when people mentally fix errors in a sentence without even noticing.

“Our brains are so good at predicting what is plausible,” Li says. “Sometimes they give a good-enough answer rather than a perfect answer because this is more efficient.”

This, Li argues, is not a flaw but a feature of human cognition. Our brains rely on shortcuts, or what scientists call heuristics, to process language quickly and efficiently. She used EEG recordings, which measure electrical activity in the brain, along with computer modeling to study how the brain responds to language. Rather than simply tracking when people mentally correct errors, Li wanted to better understand the hidden cognitive processes that make those corrections possible.

The same questions that guided Li’s dissertation are now shaping her work in artificial intelligence. After graduating from UC Irvine, Li is bringing those ideas into industry with jobs at Amazon and Apple.

“Human brains process enormous amounts of information with limited resources,” she says. “We can create endless meaning from language, and somehow we do it naturally and almost effortlessly.”

Open questions

Li chose to attend UC Irvine because she saw a rare intellectual culture.

“The department really fosters an atmosphere of intellectual conversation,” she says. “Everyone is so interested in research and so willing to share their expertise and interests.”

Her advisor, language science professor Richard Futrell, became central to her development as a researcher. Li describes him as both deeply rigorous and remarkably open-minded, someone who encouraged ambitious questions while helping students connect them to broader scientific debates.

“He gave me the freedom to pursue the topics that interested me most,” she says. “When you’re new to research, it can be hard to identify which questions are worth pursuing. He was very good at helping me shape those ideas and connecting them to broader conversations in the field.”

That flexibility became one of the defining features of Li’s graduate experience. The language science program allows students to shape coursework around their own research interests rather than forcing them into rigid requirements. Li says that freedom made it possible for her to move fluidly across disciplines and methodologies.

Just as important was the department’s collaborative culture. Li worked closely with multiple faculty members whose expertise pushed her thinking in new directions. Language science assistant professor Xin Xie, for instance, introduced her to speech research after Li had focused primarily on written language. Li also describes her as a model of what sustained intellectual passion looks like in practice.

“The moment she started talking about research she came alive,” Li says.

Language science associate professor Greg Scontras helped her learn how to share research across different audiences, a skill that proved essential when she moved into industry. That range of mentorship, technical, communicative and personal, reflects something Li sees as distinctive about the program.

“One of the most valuable skills in social science is learning how to tackle complex, abstract problems,” Li says. “You have to connect big ideas about human behavior and thinking with real-world tools and evidence.”

Li’s move into tech did not represent a departure from her research so much as an extension of it. At Amazon, she worked as a language engineer helping develop training and evaluation datasets for Nova, the company’s large language model. Her team focused on improving the model’s performance in complex domains such as mathematical reasoning, logical reasoning, and medicine. She also felt a certain satisfaction about working at a larger scale. The model she was helping to build would eventually reach millions of users. But over time, she found herself drawn back toward the kind of deep, open-ended inquiry that had defined her years at UC Irvine.

That pull is what led her to Apple. At Apple, she will explore whether AI models make mistakes for the same reason human brains do. Her hypothesis is that they default to what is statistically probable rather than what is precisely correct. If that is true, then the models developed to study the human brain might also help researchers understand, and correct, the behavior of AI systems.

Carrying the research forward

Li’s path to Amazon and Apple began far from Silicon Valley. She grew up in Shanxi, a small industrial city in China known for coal mining and heavy industry. Her parents valued education and encouraged her to pursue opportunities wherever they led. She studied in Hong Kong as an undergraduate before earning a master’s degree at the University of Chicago.

“They were always saying, ‘You can always come back home, and we will support you,’” Li says. “It’s so nice to know that you have a support system while you are working on something difficult far away from home.”

That unconditional support, she says, made it easier to keep saying yes to the unknown, whether that meant a new city, a new discipline, or a new kind of intelligence to examine.

“I benefited enormously from my time at UCI because it gave me the confidence to take on new challenges,” she says. “As long as you’re asking meaningful questions and using the best tools available to answer them, you can feel confident that you’re doing good science.”

For Li, that confidence has a very specific destination. The storyteller is still making mistakes. So are the machines. For Li, that is not a problem to be solved so much as a career’s worth of questions to be asked.

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The questions beneath the equations

Post author By Sean Collins
Post date October 23, 2026

Jill Kato for UC Irvine School of Social Sciences

When scientists develop a theory, what exactly have they discovered? When two theories appear different but make the same predictions, are they describing the same reality? And when physicists claim to understand the world, what kind of understanding have they achieved?

These are the kinds of questions that occupy Clara Bradley, a philosopher of science whose research sits at the intersection of physics, mathematics and philosophy. They are also the questions that first captured her imagination as a teenager and eventually led her from England to UC Irvine, home to one of the world’s top five programs in both philosophy of physics and mathematics before joining the faculty at University College London.

To understand Bradley’s work, it helps to understand the discipline she chose to pursue. For most people, philosophy and physics seem worlds apart. One discipline brings to mind images of laboratories and equations; the other, abstract debates about knowledge and truth. Bradley’s work exists where those worlds meet.

“Philosophy of science seeks to understand how science works, why scientific knowledge is trustworthy and how scientific practice can be improved,” she says.

The field steps back from scientific discoveries themselves to examine the processes that produce them. It asks how theories are developed, how evidence functions and what scientists mean when they claim to know something about the world. Yet these questions touch on how human beings make sense of reality. For Bradley, they have been a lifelong fascination.

An obsession begins

Bradley was born in Paris and raised in London. An academic life was always something she was aware of. Her grandfather was a chemist, and her father a philosopher. Intellectual work was something she understood from an early age not simply as a profession, but as a way of engaging with the world. When she began picking up books about physics and philosophy, the problems she encountered seemed inexhaustible, and she found herself returning to them.

“I had this obsession with the subject that started when I was 16,” Bradley says. “All I wanted to do was read about it and pursue it. The world of theoretical physics was just so fascinating. I really enjoyed puzzling my way through things, trying to understand difficult concepts and conceptualize things that were quite abstract.”

Part of the inspiration came from a high school teacher who introduced her to the writings of physicist Richard Feynman. His books offered a glimpse into the ways scientists think about problems, building theories that attempt to explain everything from subatomic particles to the structure of the cosmos. The deeper Bradley ventured into physics, the more she found herself drawn to the conceptual foundations beneath it. The questions of physics naturally led to questions of philosophy.

As an undergraduate at the University of Bristol, Bradley pursued both disciplines, earning an MSci in physics and philosophy. Rather than choosing between them, she discovered that each enriched the other. Physics provided powerful explanations of the natural world. Philosophy offered tools for interpreting what those explanations meant. Together, they gave Bradley a way to pursue the intellectual puzzles that had occupied her since adolescence.

Finding an intellectual home

Bradley’s path to UC Irvine began thousands of miles away, at a summer school in Munich. As a first-year undergraduate, Bradley attended a program for women in mathematical philosophy. One of the instructors was James Weatherall, a professor in UC Irvine’s Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science whose work she had already begun reading.

“I was super excited to meet him,” she says.

What began as a brief encounter would become one of the most consequential relationships of Bradley’s academic life. Weatherall recognized both Bradley’s enthusiasm and her talent, and after the summer program ended, their conversations continued. He read her work, discussed ideas with her and helped introduce her to a field that few undergraduates encounter in depth. Over time, the relationship evolved into an informal mentorship. By the time she began applying to doctoral programs, Bradley’s priorities were clear.

“I had never heard of Irvine as a place or a university,” she says. “All I knew is that I wanted to work with Jim.”

What drew her across the Atlantic was initially one person. What kept her there was an intellectual community. The Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science is among the world’s top-ranked programs, with nine subfields ranked in the top five. It brings together students who approach philosophy through their interests in science, mathematics and problem-solving. For Bradley, who had spent years pursuing a relatively niche set of interests, the experience was revelatory.

“I couldn’t believe how many like-minded people there were,” she says.

Over the years, Bradley developed close friendships with fellow students and became part of a community that remained intellectually engaged long after seminars ended.

“I became extremely close friends with so many people as a result of it,” she says.

Those relationships were one part of what made the program distinctive. Mentorship was another.

“Jim has been the central part of my life since I was 18 years old,” Bradley says. “He’s been that person who’s always pushed me to be the best person possible, always supported me, but in a way that let me become my own person.”

That support often took practical forms. Before conference presentations, Bradley would give practice talks. Before entering the academic job market, she participated in mock interviews with faculty members who offered feedback and guidance.

“Every time I gave a talk, Jim would let me give him a practice talk,” she says. “Before I did my job interviews I did a practice interview with the department.”

That kind of support was built into the program itself.

“It was always very clear throughout the program what you should be doing at each stage and how they can support you,” Bradley says.

What counts as the same thing?

At the center of Bradley’s doctoral research was a question: How do we know when two theories are really saying the same thing? Physicists sometimes develop multiple ways of expressing a single theory. The mathematical formulations can look quite different, even when scientists believe they describe the same phenomenon.

“I was looking at particular cases in physics where physicists talk about there being lots of different ways of formulating one theory,” Bradley says. “It’s almost like two different languages for describing the same thing.”

Physicists often assume that different formulations are interchangeable. Bradley wanted to understand what justifies that assumption and whether it always holds. The problem sits within philosophy of science. It is not primarily about producing new physical theories. It is about understanding what existing theories mean and how scientists should interpret them.

The question may sound esoteric, but it touches on a broader challenge that runs throughout scientific inquiry. Scientific theories do not arrive neatly labeled with instructions explaining what they reveal about reality. Scientists and philosophers alike must determine how to interpret them. Bradley’s work sought to develop clearer ways of comparing theories and understanding what they tell us about the world.

For Bradley, careful thinking often begins by slowing down. Before asking whether a problem can be solved, she wants to know whether it has been framed correctly in the first place. The deepest challenges are not always the result of missing information. Sometimes they emerge from the struggle to make sense of what we already know.

The big puzzles

In academia, landing a permanent faculty position can be a long and uncertain process. As Bradley neared the end of her doctoral studies, she decided to test the market cautiously by going out “softly” on the job market. Then a position opened at University College London.

“I saw the posting and thought, ‘I would love to be in London. UCL is an amazing department with amazing people. I’d love to work there,'” Bradley says. “The stars aligned. I ended up getting the job by December, and in the end, it turned out to be the only job that I applied for.”

Today, Bradley continues to build on ideas that first emerged during her doctoral research. Her work focuses on foundational questions in physics, including puzzles that arise from one of the discipline’s most famous unresolved challenges. General relativity explains gravity and the large-scale structure of the universe, while quantum mechanics describes the microscopic world of particles and fields. Both work remarkably well, but they do not necessarily fit together easily. The conceptual puzzles surrounding those theories are precisely the kinds of questions that attract her.

“I like to think that what I’m trying to do at the moment is make my mark on some of the big puzzles that are in physics right now,” she says.

She hopes philosophical analysis can also help scientists think more clearly about their own work. If philosophers can clarify assumptions, identify conceptual confusion or reveal hidden possibilities, they may help shape the future direction of scientific inquiry itself.

The questions have grown more complex. The mathematics has become more sophisticated. But her underlying curiosity remains unchanged. The universe still presents plenty of mysteries. And Clara Bradley is still asking what it means to understand them.

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Young-Suk Grace Kim receives Carol Connor Mid-Career Award

Post author By Sean Collins
Post date October 21, 2026

By Rachel Sampson of the School of Education

Young-Suk Grace Kim, professor at the UC Irvine School of Education, has received the Carol Connor Mid-Career Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR). The award, presented at the society’s annual conference in July, recognizes a mid-career researcher with a distinguished record of scholarship and broader contributions to the science of reading.

Established in 2022, the award honors the late Carol Connor, a former UC Irvine School of Education professor and influential literacy scholar who was serving as vice president of the society at the time of her passing. Recipients are recognized for the strength of their research as well as their contributions to advancing reading science, connecting disciplines, and supporting early-career researchers.

“Carol Connor was my colleague at UC Irvine, and receiving an award that bears her name is deeply meaningful,” said Kim. “She cared about rigorous science and about the people doing it, and I hope to honor her by mentoring the next generation of reading researchers. I am grateful to SSSR and to the students and collaborators whose work is inseparable from this recognition.”

Kim’s research examines how children develop language and literacy skills, with a focus on reading, writing, and the connections between them. She is particularly known for developing and testing the Direct and Indirect Effects models of Reading and Writing, and her work spans multiple languages and writing systems.

Kim previously served as editor-in-chief of Scientific Studies of Reading and is the incoming editor of the Journal of Educational Psychology. In 2012, she received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Barack Obama.

Learn more about the Carol Connor Mid-Career Award

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Lightening the mental load

Post author By Sean Collins
Post date October 19, 2026

Christine Byrd for UC Irvine School of Social Sciences

Everyone carries an invisible mental load, not just parents. Checking in on a friend in the midst of a breakup, planning dinner, dreaming about the future – they’re all using up your brain’s bandwidth.

Internationally renowned sociologist and UC Irvine alum Leah Ruppanner, M.A. ’06 Ph.D. ’09 wants to help people to understand, measure and manage the emotional thinking that’s zapping their energy. She’s turned years of research on gender, work and family into a practical guide for the exhausted and overwhelmed – and readers are eating it up. Her first book for general audiences, Drained: Reduce Your Mental Load to Do Less and Be More (Penguin 2026) has been internationally distributed, and is now being translated into Spanish.

“When you’re doomscrolling on TikTok or Instagram, you’re burning through your mental load, and the result is that you feel immobilized,” Ruppanner says. “My concept can help you understand why this is a waste, and how to move toward action.”

As a professor of sociology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and founding director of The Future of Work Lab and the Gender Equity Initiative, Ruppanner studies “gender at the intersection of everything,” including technology, politics, the workplace and homelife. She traces many elements of her successful international career as a scholar, author and podcaster back to her time as a graduate student at UC Irvine, where she earned her master’s in demography and population studies in 2006 and her doctorate in sociology in 2009.

“It’s really about the people,” she says. “The people I was with at UC Irvine showed me a wider blueprint of pathways that I could take.”

‘The result of perseverance’

As an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Ruppanner took several social sciences classes and found sociology was “the lens through which I could see most clearly.” At a dinner with faculty one night, she told them, “I think I want to be you,” and began her pursuit of an academic career.

Arriving at UC Irvine, Ruppanner knew she wanted to study gender – but she soon discovered that topic is too broad to tackle in a lifetime, let alone one graduate program. Her advisors Judith Treas, Distinguished Professor emerita, and Matt Huffman, professor and associate dean of student programs, helped her refine her scope into more manageable pieces.

Ruppanner started contributing to Treas’ research on the division of household labor and, along the way, she learned much more than how to run a study. Treas connected her with researchers and journalists who Ruppanner still works with today.

“One of the gifts from UC Irvine was not only getting to work with faculty who are leaders in the field, but who also understand the value of mentorship, who pulled me up on my journey and used their resources to help me give opportunities to meet people who I couldn’t have otherwise at my age and stage,” Ruppaner says. “And it’s still bringing me value.”

The master’s degree that Ruppanner earned on the way to her doctorate helped make her more marketable, and the cross-national aspect of Treas’ research gave Ruppanner access to positions in the international academic job market. Still, graduating in 2009 at the peak of the Great Recession tested her commitment to academia. She applied for hundreds of jobs, she says, before landing one.

“I want people to know that the story you’re seeing today is the result of perseverance. I had to do soul searching, I had to stay persistent,” she says. “If you feel like you’re getting those knocks, it doesn’t mean you’re not on the right path. This journey is hard.”

Ruppanner eventually took a tenure-track position at the University of Melbourne, where she turned her research focus back to the U.S. Collaborating with an international team, Ruppanner examined state policies affecting working mothers – comparing states of the union in a way she had previously compared European countries. Her book Motherlands: How States Push Mothers Out of Employment, was published in 2020, on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the pandemic blurred lines between work and home life, Ruppanner teamed up with Senior Researcher for Equity at the U.S. Census Bureau Liana Christin Landivar, M.A. ’04, Ph.D. ’07, whom she knew from graduate school. The duo mapped the pandemic responses state by state, measuring how policies like school closures impacted women’s employment – work that would ultimately influence the president’s economic policy in 2023.

Reaching different audiences

That’s exactly the kind of impact Ruppanner aspires to make. She’s been named Australia’s top sociologist and top gender studies scholar, but what she really wants is for sociology research to benefit people’s lives. That seed, planted by a sociology professor when Ruppanner was still a graduate student at UC Irvine, grew as she established her own body of research.

“Sociology’s ideas are incredibly sticky and valuable, they can change the way people see the world and see themselves. In a moment when social science is under attack, we need to be out in the world talking about it,” she says. “If we’re not doing the work to connect to people, if we just publish in isolation, then we’re dead in the water.”

So she started writing for The Conversation in Australia, and felt the thrill of her ideas reaching millions of people. Plunging further into the cultural zeitgeist, she launched her own podcast, Miss Perceived, in which she declares, “I’ve made it my life’s mission to take down every ridiculous gender myth out there – like do pretty people get paid more or are women better multitaskers?” For Ruppanner, podcasting allows her to be more “3 dimensional” as a human and not only a scholar – but it’s also served as a sort of feedback loop for her research.

“What I’m learning from the podcast is how to talk to different audiences in a different way. It’s more of a heart-first connection than a head-first connection, and that’s almost like a focus group for a research project,” she says. “Academics tend to speak through data, but we need a bridge to them through the narrative heart of the story first.”

“I’ve been trying to build an ecosystem of research translation, and podcasting helps me do that,” she adds.

Sticky ideas

As a founding director of the Future of Work Lab and the Gender Equity Initiative at the University of Melbourne, Ruppanner continues pursuing research that improves lives. Working with computer science, economics and business scholars in the lab, she aims to ensure work is equitable and inclusive, even as it’s reshaped by powerful emerging forces like artificial intelligence. One of her ongoing research projects deals with reskilling for the future workforce.

In 2023, Ruppanner received a $1.2 million fellowship from the Australian Research Council to take a deep dive on the mental load – an increasingly sticky idea that women, especially, are drowning in invisible labor.

Talking to the BBC, Ruppanner explained the motivation behind the project: “I’ve studied gender, work, family, housework and domestic divisions for decades. And even though we kept seeing that men were doing more at home – we kept seeing this movement towards progress – there was this thing that just wasn’t working, this thing that we weren’t capturing, that we weren’t measuring. That thing is the mental load.”

Defined as “thinking work with emotional weight,” the mental load comes in eight distinct varieties, according to Ruppanner, ranging from everyday planning and tasks to cultivating one’s dreams and ambitions. She also spells out seven stages of the mental load, from identifying and remembering the problem to executing and monitoring the solution. All of that invisible labor can lead to burnout. Figuring out where you’re spending mental energy can help prevent that.

In Drained and on her website LightenLab, Ruppanner offers a worksheet to help account for the mental load you’re carrying. From there, individuals or couples can unpack, redistribute, and reload in a way that makes sense and, hopefully, is more equitable. Because the mental load shifts over the course of a day, a week, or a year, Ruppanner suggests monitoring it regularly – just like taking blood pressure or counting your daily steps.

Ruppanner would love to see her ideas catch on the same way wearable trackers have, helping people understand and ultimately lighten their mental load – and proving that sociology can make your life better.

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Supporting Graduate Student Families: A Q&A with Megan Yoo Schneider

Post author By Sean Collins
Post date August 28, 2026

Megan Yoo Schneider (B.S. ’12, M.S. ’14) knows that success in graduate school rarely happens in isolation. As a two-time UC Irvine engineering alumna, executive leader at Accenture, and member of the Graduate Division Dean’s Leadership Council, she has experienced firsthand the importance of community, mentorship and perseverance. Recently, she and her husband, Nicholas, named the lactation room at the Verano 8 Community Center, creating a welcoming space for graduate student parents.

UCI Graduate Division spoke with Megan about her unconventional path to UC Irvine, what inspired her gift, and why supporting graduate students means supporting their families as well.

Your journey to UC Irvine wasn’t exactly traditional. What led you here, and what was your experience like?

My path to UC Irvine was definitely unconventional.

Growing up in Irvine, I assumed I would leave California for college. My high school had encouraged me to apply early to Harvard, and that was the direction everyone expected me to take. But during my senior year, my family experienced significant trauma. My grades dropped, and when Harvard asked what had happened, I didn’t have the language to explain it. I simply sent them poetry. Needless to say, I wasn’t admitted.

I received a full scholarship to Tulane University to study environmental engineering, but before classes even began, Hurricane Katrina changed everything. The university eliminated my major, and shortly afterward I learned they were restructuring their engineering program. I realized it wasn’t the right fit for me.

I transferred to USC, but despite being promised financial support, the scholarship didn’t fully materialize. I simply couldn’t afford to stay. I remember collections calling me every week, and eventually I had to leave school and begin working full time.

After a couple of years, I transferred to UC Irvine.

By then, I understood exactly what education meant to me because I had fought so hard to get there. I worked throughout school, carefully planned my finances, found internships, and earned scholarships through professional organizations. I’m incredibly grateful that I graduated debt-free.

Even when I returned to earn my master’s degree, I approached it with the same mindset. I worked full time during the day, took evening classes, and structured my coursework around my employer’s tuition reimbursement program. It wasn’t always easy, but UC Irvine gave me the flexibility to make it work.

What inspired you to give back to UC Irvine by naming the lactation room at Verano 8?

Serving on the Dean’s Leadership Council has allowed me to hear so many graduate students share their personal stories. One of the things I appreciate most about UC Irvine is how intentionally it supports students from all backgrounds. It’s not just culturally and ethnically, but also economically and through different life experiences.

My husband, Nicholas and I don’t have children. We’ve been navigating IVF after my cancer journey, and that experience made this opportunity especially meaningful to us.

When people hear “lactation room,” they often think it’s only about supporting mothers. But it’s really about supporting families. Having a dedicated, welcoming space helps parents balance graduate school with raising children, and that’s something that benefits the entire family.

Graduate students aren’t just researchers or scholars. Many are also spouses, caregivers and parents. When we support those parts of their lives, we’re helping them succeed academically too.

Why is supporting graduate student families so important to you?

When I was earning my master’s degree, many of my classmates were doctoral students. One friend had young children and was pursuing his Ph.D. when his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. Ultimately, he had to leave his program to care for his family.

Stories like his have stayed with me.

Graduate school is already incredibly demanding. When you add caregiving responsibilities, financial pressures or unexpected life challenges, the burden becomes even greater.

Today having completed an executive doctorate myself, I’ve watched accomplished CEOs and senior executives struggle through the dissertation process. It reminds me just how mentally and emotionally demanding graduate education can be.

That’s why I believe supporting graduate students means supporting their entire support system. Small resources—whether it’s childcare, family spaces or a lactation room—can make an enormous difference in helping students persist toward their degrees.

What motivated you to join the Graduate Division Dean’s Leadership Council?

I have Professor Goran Matijašević to thank for that.

He taught one of my favorite classes at UC Irvine about entrepreneurship and engineering. What made the course so impactful was that he invited engineers who had become entrepreneurs to share their experiences.

For the first time, I realized that the way I approached problems wasn’t unusual, I simply had an entrepreneurial mindset. Throughout my career, I’ve always asked, “How can we improve this? Is there a better way?” Early on, especially as an Asian woman in a traditionally male-dominated engineering field, I sometimes felt like people wanted me to stop asking questions.

That class helped me understand that curiosity and challenging the status quo could actually be strengths.

Years later, Goran encouraged me to join the Dean’s Leadership Council. I’m incredibly grateful he did because it’s given me another way to stay connected to UC Irvine and support future graduate students.

Your career has included engineering, business, technology, public service and education. What continues to motivate you?

I’ve always believed education has the power to transform lives.

That’s one reason I serve on the advisory board for Breakthrough San Juan Capistrano, which helps first-generation students prepare for college and successfully navigate higher education.

One thing I’ve learned is that getting students into college is only part of the equation. They also need emotional support, mentorship and community to help them thrive once they’re there.

That resonates deeply with my own experience because there were so many moments in my educational journey when mentors and professional networks opened doors that I couldn’t have opened by myself.

What advice would you give graduate students beginning their journey at UC Irvine this fall?

First, you don’t have to have everything figured out right now.

Second, enjoy the journey.

It’s so easy to become focused on the destination that you forget to appreciate the people, experiences and opportunities along the way. The friendships you build, the mentors you meet and the memories you make at UC Irvine will stay with you long after you’ve earned your degree.

You’ll get where you’re going. Don’t forget to enjoy the process, not just the outcome.

Looking ahead, what do you hope UC Irvine continues to do for graduate students?

I hope UC Irvine continues doing exactly what it does so well, which is seeing students as whole people.

Graduate students aren’t defined only by their research. They’re members of families, communities and workplaces. When universities recognize all of those dimensions, students are better equipped to succeed.

I also hope higher education continues to emphasize the lifelong value of learning. A degree doesn’t teach you every answer you’ll need in your career. What it does teach is how to think critically, solve complex problems, communicate effectively and continue learning throughout your life.

Those are the skills that remain valuable no matter where your career takes you, and they’re exactly what UC Irvine continues to cultivate.

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