Social Sciences Discovery Fellows

Current Fellows

Headshot of Kirstin Krusell

Kirstin Krusell

Kirstin Krusell is a PhD candidate in sociology and an NSF Graduate Research Fellow at UC Berkeley. Her research uses qualitative methods to investigate risk and uncertainty—from how it’s felt at an everyday level to its political economy. Previously she has studied how labor unions are navigating the challenges of AI and automation in the workplace, and her current research examines the rise of “doomsday” prepping across the American political spectrum. Her work has been supported by grants from UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and Center for Right-Wing Studies.

Headshot of Daniel Lobo

Daniel Lobo

Daniel Lobo is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California-Berkeley, also affiliated with the Management of Organizations (MORS) group at the Haas School of Business. As an economic sociologist, his research focuses on power, ideology, moral psychology, and the organizational-level mechanisms that allocate opportunity and reproduce income and wealth inequality. He tends to use a mixed-methods approach, including interviews, surveys, field experiments, and computational techniques. His dissertation research focuses on how competing organizational frames of "merit" shape inequality in job hiring and performance evaluations at elite firms. Daniel holds an A.B. in Social Studies, with high honors, from Harvard College and a M.A. in Sociology from UC Berkeley. Outside of academia, he enjoys hiking, lifting, traveling, live music, meditation, all things Oakland, and spending time with loved ones. Daniel identifies as Black (ethnically Cape Verdean), queer, and working-class. He is also a first-generation American and college graduate.

Headshot of Justin Germain

Justin Germain

Justin Germain is a PhD Candidate in the Sociology Department at U.C. Berkeley. His research addresses the ways in which creative and relatively autonomous workers experience, and struggle against, exploitation via their physical bodies. His dissertation utilizes such a framework to better understand the labor process of voice actors as they navigate the uncertainty surrounding technological displacement by the hands of digital replicas and artificial intelligence.

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Steven Herrera Tenorio

Steven Herrera Tenorio is a Ph.D. Student in Sociology & Demography at UC Berkeley. He is interested in the politics of immigration, ethnoracial stratification, urban sociology, and demography, and he uses a variety of methods (in-depth interviews, ethnographic, longitudinal & demographic methods). His current research focuses on analyzing the symbolic politics of belonging among Central American and Mexican immigrants in the U.S. South.