Faculty Advisory Committee

Armando Lara-Millán

Associate Professor of Sociology
Department of Sociology

Armando Lara-Millán is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at UC Berkeley. He earned his PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University in 2013. Before joining the Department of Sociology, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar in Health Policy Research at UC Berkeley. Armando is fascinated by how powerful organizations, whose actions affect the life fortunes of large numbers of people, use language to reshape critical material resources; that is, he examines how these organizations use culture and cognitive processes to recast the...

Gabriel Lenz

Professor
Charles and Louis Travers Department of Political Science

Gabriel Lenz is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies democratic accountability, focusing on how to help voters hold their politicians accountable and how governments can protect people from violence and incarceration. He has published a book on elections with the University of Chicago Press and has published articles in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and Journal of Politics, Political Analysis, and other journals.

Amy E. Lerman

Professor of Public Policy and Political Science; Co-Director
Charles and Louis Travers Department of Political Science
Goldman School of Public Policy
The People Lab

Professor Amy E. Lerman is a political scientist who studies issues of race, public opinion, and political behavior, especially as they relate to punishment and social inequality in America. She is the author of two books on the American criminal justice system—The Modern Prison Paradox and Arresting Citizenship (awarded a best book award from the Urban Politics Section of the American Political Science Association). Her most recent book, Good Enough for Government Work, which was awarded both the Woodrow Wilson Award and the Gladys Kammerer Award from the American Political Science...

Jovan Lewis

Assistant Professor of Human Geography; Founder/Director
Department of Geography
Berkeley Black Geographies Project

Jovan Scott Lewis is assistant professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He co-leads the Economic Disparities research cluster in Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute. He received his PhD in anthropology from the London School of Economics. Jovan’s research is concerned with the articulations of racialized poverty, which he examines through questions of racial capitalism, underdevelopment, and radical terms of repair. He has conducted research in Jamaica on these topics, which culminated in his monograph, Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica....

Cecilia Mo

Associate Professor of Political Science
Charles and Louis Travers Department of Political Science

Cecilia Hyunjung Mo is an associate professor of Political Science at University of California, Berkeley. She is also an associate professor of public policy (by courtesy) at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. She specializes in behavioral political economy, comparative political behavior, the political economy of development, and social policy research. She focuses on significant contemporary challenges to development and moral issues of today like cultivating democratic citizenship, understanding and addressing the negative consequences of rising inequality, combatting modern...

Rachel Morello-Frosch

Professor of Environmental Health Sciences and Community Health Sciences
Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management

Rachel Morello-Frosch is a Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management and the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. For over 20 years, her research has examined social determinants of environmental health among diverse communities with a focus on inequality, psychosocial stress and how these factors interact with environmental chemical exposures to produce health inequalities. Much of her work has examined this environmental justice question in the context of climate change, ambient air pollution, exposures to environmental chemicals and effects on...

Christian Paiz

Assistant Professor
Department of Ethnic Studies

Broadly speaking, I am a twentieth-century U.S. labor historian with interests in transnational migration, social movements, and history methods. In my first book, titled The Strikers of Coachella: A Rank-and-File History of the UFW Movement (UNC Press, 2023), I studied how farmworkers in Southern California’s Coachella Valley (men, women, migrants, residents, Filipino and Mexican) envisioned their...

Laura E. Pérez

Professor of Chicano/Latino Studies, Chair
Latinx Research Center

Laura E. Pérez is Chair of the new interdisciplinary and transAmericas research hub, the Latinx Research Center, formerly the Center for Latino Policy Research. She is author of Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Duke University Press, 2007) in which she theorized decolonial aesthetics and decolonial spiritualities while achiving the work of more than forty Chicana visual, literary, and performance artists from the early 1970s through the early 2000s. She curated UC Berkeley’s first and only US Latina/o Performance Art series in 2001-02; co-curated, with...

Jesse Rothstein

Professor of Public Policy and Economics
Department of Economics
Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE)

Jesse Rothstein is a professor of public policy and economics. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 2009. He spent the 2009-10 academic year in public service, first as Senior Economist at the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers and then as Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. Earlier, he was assistant professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in economics from UC Berkeley in 2003.

Janelle Scott

Robert C. and Mary Catherine Birgeneau Distinguished Chair in Educational Disparities
Graduate School of Education

Janelle Scott is a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the Graduate School of Education and African American Studies Department. She holds the Robert C. and Mary Catherine Birgeneau Distinguished Chair in Educational Disparities. Scott earned a Ph.D. in Education Policy from the University of California, Los Angeles Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to earning her doctorate, she taught elementary school in Oakland, Calif.

Her research explores the relationship...