Graduate Policy Fellows

Jessica Duda is a 4th-year Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology. Her research investigates cognitive mechanisms of depression and anxiety, integrating self-report, behavioral tasks, computational modeling, and neuroimaging.  She is particularly interested in how people perceive and cope with uncertain conditions across development, and the role of these processes in internalizing pathology. As an ISPS fellow, she is examining how uncertainty around the current legislative climate contributes to anxiety and depression in LGBTQ+ youth.

Zhouyan Liu is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science. His research interests include authoritarian politics and historical political economy. He is currently working on a project concerning diasporas from authoritarian countries and the political consequences of migration in both sending and receiving countries, with a particular focus on China as an empirical case. Prior to attending Yale, he worked as an investigative journalist for four years at one of China’s largest news magazines, Sanlian Life Weekly. He received his B.A. from Peking University and M.P.P.

Génesis is a Ph.D. student in Sociology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her work focuses on understanding how social movements, technology, and expertise influence people’s experiences with healthcare. Her academic and professional practice nurtures from her work as an advocate with a decade of experience in grassroots feminist organizing. Her last research project “Becoming abortion experts: making and transforming the professional boundaries of abortion care in Mexico” explores how the use of abortion medication reshapes notions of expertise in Obstetrics & Gynecology.

Michelle Venetucci is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology, with an emphasis on economic anthropology. Her dissertation explores social and structural conditions that shape corporate environments in Silicon Valley, working at the intersection of speculative finance, middle class domesticity, and new technologies. As an ISPS fellow, she will study the regulatory landscape that creates favorable conditions for private equity and venture capital in the U.S., tracing the emergence of specific financial tools and analyzing their relationship to corporate expansion.