ISPS Policy Fellows, 2012-13 (Inaugural Class)
Sara Bastomski, Graduate Fellow, Sociology
Sara is a Ph.D. student in the Yale Department of Sociology. Sara has received grants for graduate study from the Burnand-Partridge Foundation. Sara uses quantitative methods to examine the relationship between neighborhood disadvantage and domestic violence rates in major U.S. cities, with attention to the crime prevention policy implications of this research. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, Sara worked at a social service agency, developing culturally-competent program evaluation methods appropriate for programs that serve at-risk urban Native American youth. Additionally, Sara has conducted ethnographic fieldwork on the juvenile justice system in Los Angeles and New York City. Sara's research interests include crime and deviance, neighborhood inequality, gender, and sexual violence. Sara earned her B.A. in Sociology, magna cum laude with Departmental Honors, at UCLA (2008) and her M.A. in Sociology at Columbia University (2011).
Adam Dynes, Graduate Student, Political Science
Adam received his B.A. in political science from Brigham Young University (2005) and is a doctoral student in the Political Science Department at Yale University. Adam studies legislative behavior at the national, state, and local levels. In particular, he is interested in distributive politics, partisanship, and the means by which elected officials balance their own policy preferences with those of their district and party. Prior to pursuing his Ph.D., Adam worked in state politics for four years.
.jpg)
Gloria Gong, Law Student
Gloria is a J.D. at Yale Law School, where her interests include access to the legal system for underprivileged groups and consumer protection in China. Prior to studying at Yale, Gloria Jean was a research associate at the Yale Law School China Law Center in Beijing where she worked on projects on food safety, open government information, and administrative law. She was also previously a fellow in the US Chinese Flagship Program where she researched Chinese environmental law and policy. Gloria Jean graduated from Brigham Young University with a Bachelor’s in Chinese and Media Arts Studies.
Andrew Horowitz, Graduate Student, History
Andy is a History Ph.D. candidate at Yale University. His dissertation, “The End of Empire, Louisiana: Disaster and Recovery on the Gulf Coast, 1915-2011,” explores the political, cultural, and environmental history of the last hundred miles of the Mississippi River in order to reveal how recovery from disasters has changed over the course of the twentieth century. From 2003 to 2007, he served as founding director of the New Haven Oral History Project at Yale, and taught courses at Yale on oral history and urban studies. He has directed documentary projects on topics ranging from rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina to Holocaust memory, from urban renewal to the invention of the hamburger. He has worked with the Louisiana State Museum and the University of North Carolina’s Southern Oral History Program, and has served as a research associate at American Routes, the nationally-syndicated public radio program about American music. He has given invited lectures at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and his writing has been published in the Journal of American History and The New York Times.
Matthew Lawrence, Graduate Student, Sociology
Matt is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Yale University. His research interests include social mobility, stratification, and higher education. He is currently working on his dissertation, which examines multigenerational inequalities in education. Prior to graduate school, Matt worked as an admission officer at Stanford University and as a college counselor at a high school near Boston. He completed his undergraduate degree at Stanford and also holds a masters degree in education policy from Harvard.
David Louk, Law Student
David is a J.D. student at Yale Law School and a Ph.D. candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at UC Berkeley. His legal research interests include tax law and policy; distributive justice; U.S. constitutional law and theory; international law and international relations; and property law. He is writing his dissertation on the distinction between real property and mobile wealth in the history of political thought and the importance of this distinction for contemporary political communities. He has previously received an MPhil at the University of Oxford as a Clarendon Scholar and a BA with distinction at Stanford University.
Mary McGrath, Graduate Student, Political Science
Mary is a doctoral student in the Political Science Department, and has a Master's degree from Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Her research focuses on the roles of scientific authority and democratic authority in the development of science-based policy, and the processes of communication among scientists, policy-makers, and the public that allow translation of science into policy. Mary has a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Chicago.
Michael Sierra-Arévalo , Graduate Student, Sociology
Michael graduated in 2011 from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.A. in sociology and psychology. His research interests center around the broad categories of race/ethnicity, culture, urban sociology, violence, and gangs. As an ISPS fellow, Michael will be undertaking research that focuses on the diffusion of violence through urban networks, and how social networks of high-risk individuals relates to homicide victimization.
Erin Thomas, Graduate Student, Psychology
Erin is a graduate student in the Social Psychology program at Yale who aims to develop accessible interventions that mitigate social, occupational, and political inequalities. In the year preceding her graduate school matriculation, Erin assisted in research at Yale for Dr. Jack Dovidio while working full-time in university administration as a Woodbridge Fellow in the Yale President's Office.