Graduate Student Affiliate

Kiran Stallone

Graduate Student
Sociology

Kiran Stallone holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley and an MSc in Latin American Studies from the University of Oxford. She analyzes gender and civilian agency in war and conflict, with a focus on Colombia. Through her work, she contributes to peacebuilding and conflict resolution efforts by providing insights and recommendations that address the complexities of armed conflict violence.

She has led research and data collection projects in 10 different Colombian departments (the equivalent to states), and has engaged with countless communities affected...

Matthew Stenberg

Graduate Student
Political Science

Matthew Stenberg is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studies Central Europe and the European Union. His research interests include democratic backsliding, local politics, and multilevel party politics.

Alexander Stephenson

Graduate Student
Political Science

Alexander Stephenson is a PhD Student in the Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley. His primary research interests are military organizations, policing, the determinants of political violence, and causal inference. He is also interested in creating tools to make software easier to use for non-technical political scientists. Stephenson holds a B.A. from the University of Minnesota focused on Political Science and Statistics.

He is also a mentor for the IIS Undergraduate Fellowship Program.

Emily Fjaellen Thompson

Graduate Student
Anthropology

Emily Fjaellen Thompson is a PhD student in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her bachelor's degree in Latin American and Latino/a Studies from Vassar College, where she was awarded the Burnam Fellowship for work on the U.S.-Mexico border with unaccompanied minors seeking asylum and the Cornelisen Fellowship for extended fieldwork in the Peruvian Andes. She received her master's degree from the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University, where she was granted FLAS awards to study Quechua in New York City and...

Varsha Venkatasubramanian

Graduate Student
History

Varsha Venkatasubramanian is a graduate student in the History Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies the history of dams in the United States and the World as it relates to foreign policy, policy history, environmental movements, and legal history. Her dissertation focuses on U.S.-India relations and infrastructure projects during the 1950s to the 1980s.

Levi Vonk

Graduate Student
Anthropology

Levi Vonk is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Francisco. His ethnographic research focuses on Central American migration through Mexico, with particular attention paid to how the migrant experience is explained in terms of violence, multiculturalism, asylum, and border externalization and militarization. His first book, which follows the journey of an undocumented migrant hacker, will be published by Bold Type Books (Hachette) in Spring 2022.

Vonk is the recipient of the 2021 IIS...

Kathryn White

Graduate Student
Goldman School of Public Policy

For the past 18 months, I have been representing Accenture as a Fellow at the World Economic Forum's Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, co-leading a consortia focused on blockchain & digital currency. I have worked for Accenture for 10 years across many emerging technology projects, including a rotation with an international development client. Currently, I work for Accenture's Blockchain and Multiparty Systems practice, focused on defining the future of money. I am passionate about ensuring that diverse voices are included in the next evolution of money and that the...

Soo Sun You

Graduate Student
Political Science

Soo Sun You is pursuing a Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus on comparative politics and political behavior. Her research interests lie at the intersection of economic and political inequality and development and studies how political institutions affect levels of perceived economic inequality and political behavior in sub-Saharan Africa. Prior to pursuing her Ph.D., Soo Sun worked as a Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) research fellow in Ethiopia, implementing and analyzing the impact of women’s empowerment programs. She also worked as...