Development

Research Interest

Sakina Dhorajiwala

PhD Student
Political Science

Sakina is a PhD candidate in the Political Science Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on how citizen state relationships change with the proliferation of technology in welfare service delivery in South Asia.

She holds a Masters in International Development Policy from Duke University, a Masters in Public Policy & a Bachelors in Economics from University of Mumbai. In the past she has worked as a researcher with LibTech India, an organization focused on improving public service delivery, in collaboration with several...

Zhehang Zhang

PhD Student
Sociology

Zhehang Zhang is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research lies at the intersection of political sociology, political economy, development, and economic geography, with a regional focus on China and Southeast Asia. His dissertation examines cross-border industrial development in the China–Southeast Asia borderlands, asking how state-led development operates across sovereign boundaries and how these transnational projects reshape state institutions, territorial governance, labor, and local political economies. His broader interests include...

Valerie Zhu

Graduate Student
Political Scienc
Valerie is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her intellectual curiosity lies in International Relations theories, the evolution of strategic competition, and the interplay between global conflicts and state-building in the case of proxy warfare. Valerie holds a B.A. in Political Science with High Honors from the University of Chicago and completed her Master's training at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and L'Institut d'études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po).

Carlos Schmidt-Padilla

Assistant Professor
Goldman School of Public Policy

Carlos Schmidt-Padilla is an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. His research examines how crime, human capital, and migration shape development and political order across Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.

Foreign Policy

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Cross-Cutting Global Challenges



Conflict & Fragility

Oct. 19 Book Talk | Agrarian Superpower: Food, Development, and the Global Ascendancy of the United States

September 16, 2026
A book talk by Samantha Iyer Associate Professor of history, Fordham University The IIS Global History Seminar welcomes Dr. Samantha Iyer to discuss her newly published book Agrarian Superpower: Food, Development, and the Global Ascendancy of the United States. The talk discusses how the United States's status as a superpower in the mid-twentieth century was not only built on its industrial, financial, and military might but also something often seen as backward—agriculture. It focuses...

Cloud Capitalism and the AI Transition

April 2, 2026
Berkeley Economy & Society Initiative
April 09, 2026| 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM|820 Social Sciences Building Cloud Capitalism and the AI Transition With Kathy Thelen, Ford Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Join MIT political scientist Kathy Thelen at BESI as she explores the origins and implications of the new cloud business model powering the AI boom. She’ll elaborate on how this model differs from the traditional platform model out of which it grew, as well as the technological, political, and distributional impacts of the rise of this new business model. She...

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeGJHd26W4iVk87J58LodpCjmLb2cj3idodGERn…

Trevor Jackson

Associate Professor of History and Political Economy
History and Political Economy

Trevor Jackson is assistant professor of History and Political Economy. He studies capitalism, inequality, and financial crisis, mostly but not exclusively in early modern Europe.