The following scholars participated in the Junior Scholars Symposium's second edition in June of 2025 at the Latinx Research Center:
Blanca Ramirez
Blanca A. Ramirez, PhD, is currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is affiliated with the Rapport Center for Human Rights and the Latino Research Institute. Dr. Ramirez’s research explores the social consequences of the reproduction of inequality through an examination of how immigration laws structurally affect institutions and social groups. Specifically, she examines how these laws shape professions, Latinx communities, and familial ties. Her research can be found in Social Problems, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Latino Studies, Current Sociology, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, Violence Against Women, and Journal of Interpersonal Violence. Her research has received support from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Haynes Foundation. Additionally, her work has been recognized with awards from SSSP Law & Society Division, Sociology of Law Section, and the Race, Gender, and Class Section.
Igangeli "Gigi" Salinas-Muñiz
Ignangeli Salinas-Muñiz is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Michigan and an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. She broadly studies multilevel governance and subnational access to democracy through the lens of public and elite behavior. Her dissertation project, Governed Unequal, examines how sovereignty limitations and ongoing power constraints in the United States territories shape representation and accountability. She is also working on a co-authored book project that focuses on the role of narratives in shaping political imagination in colonized spaces. Her research has been supported by internal and external grants, and she has received the university’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program’s Outstanding Research Mentor Award. Her co-authored work has been published in Perspectives on Politics. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Puerto Rico – Mayagüez Campus and is an alumna of the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute and the Summer Research Opportunities Program.
Génesis Lara
Génesis Lara is an Assistant Professor in Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Lara's forthcoming manuscript, Mobilizing Grief: Dominican Feminisms and Caribbean Human Rights centers the voices of Dominican women of color to ask how their actions of public grief, in the forms of public funerals and human rights denunciations, simultaneously contested state violence and showcased the limitations of male led leftist organizing in the Dominican Republic. More broadly speaking, the book questions how the silences surrounding human rights organizing of Dominican women of color speak to Black Caribbean human rights struggles and their wider absence from hemispheric conceptualizations and discourses of human rights. Dr. Lara was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. She completed her PhD in Caribbean History with an emphasis on African Diaspora Studies at the University of California Davis.
Laura Assanmal
Born and raised in Honduras, Laura Assanmal Peláez is an educator, youth worker, urban ethnographer, community organizer, and doctoral student. In her work, Laura explores the experiences of asylum-seeking South and Central American Latinx youth in New York City, as well as students experiencing housing insecurity. Her research explores how immigrant, unhoused, and mixed-status family students develop strategies to navigate NYC’s school and shelter system.
Laura is a PhD candidate in Sociology of Education at NYU Steinhardt’s School of Culture, Education and Human Development. Prior to joining NYU, she received a Bachelor of Arts in Social Research and Public Policy with a minor in Political Science from NYU Abu Dhabi in 2021.
Prior to starting her PhD, Laura has supported Engaging Latino Communities for Education (ENLACE) at the Bronx Institute at CUNY Lehman College. Laura has also served as a volunteer teaching assistant at Brooklyn International High School. In addition, Laura helped co-found the New Neighbors Network, a mutual aid collective dedicated to uplifting, and advocating with newcomer, unhoused youth living in city shelters in Manhattan Valley.
Laura is currently a member of the adjunct faculty at the Education Studies Program at NYU Steinhardt and the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, a researcher at the Metropolitan Center for the Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools and a recipient of the 2024–2025 Doctoral Fellowship in Urban Practice, through which she supports The Brotherhood Sister Sol’s community organizing work.
Yulenni Venegas-Lopez
Yulenni Venegas-Lopez is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. She is a scholar of American politics, Latino politics, gender, Republicanism, and her methodological expertise is in qualitative methods. Yulenni's research agenda consists of exploring how Latinidad's numerous intersections – including but not limited to gender, race, and immigration status – influence Latino's engagement with American political institutions. Her dissertation aims to provide a framework for understanding Latino Republicanism by examining Latino Republican Congressional Candidates from 2014–2024. Her work outside of academia includes community outreach to help migrants access legal resources to defend against workplace abuses, as well as GOTV campaigns for congressional elections. Outside of research and politics, Yulenni is an avid baker, oil pastel artist, and huge sci-fi + fantasy fan.
Amalia Mejia
Amalia Mejia is a Ph.D. candidate in Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine. She received her Master of Public Policy from Pepperdine University and bachelor’s in Sociology and Political Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation takes a mixed-methods approach employing a multivariate decomposition model and institutional ethnography coupled with in-depth interviews, to examine racial disparities in community supervision, with a focus on the Latinx community. Prior to graduate school, she worked in Sacramento advancing evidence-based policymaking at the county and state level, including crafting legislation to evaluate domestic violence programs. At UCI, she has contributed to research on gentrification, Mexican American oral histories, and racial disparities in criminal justice reform initiatives. She currently serves as a commissioner in the Santa Ana Police Oversight Commission and is committed to using research to inform policy and advance racial equity in public systems.
Karina Santellano
Dr. Karina Santellano (she/her/hers/ella) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University. She is an expert in the sociology of race and ethnicity, immigration, class, work/ entrepreneurship, and urban sociology. Dr. Santellano’s in progress book project examines Latinx entrepreneurship pathways, experiences, and meaning-making, particularly via the site of Latinx-owned and inspired coffee shops in Southern California. Her research and writing appear in academic journals and public outlets and have received support from the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), the American Sociological Association (ASA), Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS), and other funders.
Jozef Callan Robles
Jozef C. Robles is a sociology Ph.D. Candidate at the University of California, Irvine. The focus of his research agenda is to explore issues of immigration, race/ethnicity, and law through a variety of research methods to gain a nuanced understanding of their societal impacts. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations across California and Texas, Jozef’s dissertation examines how formerly undocumented immigrants experience legal transitions, revealing that legalization transforms individuals’ understandings of racial identity and hierarchy and their multiplicative social landscapes across different socio-political contexts.
Martha Franco
Martha C. Franco is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at California State University, Long Beach. Broadly, her research examines the various ways in which inequality can impact the everyday life of Central American unaccompanied minors. Importantly, she examines how different actors at the local, state, federal, and transnational levels can shape the experiences of unaccompanied minors. Her current research project, funded through the Spencer Foundation, explores how schools across California are responding to the needs of Central American unaccompanied youth and how the youth themselves consider the role of education in their lives in the United States.
Her research has been supported by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Immigration Initiative at Harvard, and the Spencer Foundation. She is the co-author of Undocumented Migration (2019) and Everyone Wins! The Evidence for Family-School Partnerships and Implications for Practice (2022). Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked in after school programs in Southern California and as a Visiting Fellow at Harvard College. She holds an A.B. in History and Ethnic Studies from Brown University and a PhD in Education from Harvard University.
Arlyn Moreno-Luna
Dr. Moreno Luna is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA, working under the mentorship of Dr. Rios Aguilar. Her research employs quantitative methods to investigate access, experiences, and outcomes in higher education for historically underrepresented students. Dr. Moreno Luna has developed and validated an innovative instrument to measure college adjustment, contributing to the field’s understanding of student success. Current projects focus on the college transition experiences of Latina students at an elite public four-year institution and the STEM identity and sense of belonging among Latinx students at a rural community college. She received her PhD in Education from UC Berkeley in the critical studies of race, class, and gender program. She received the 2025 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the AERA Latina/o/x Research Issues SIG and the 2025 AAHHE Best Scholarly Paper Award.
Jonathan Ibarra
Jonathan Ibarra is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and currently a Latinx Social Science Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Latinx Research Center. He is an ethnographer who studies the interactions between marginalized youth and the institutions they navigate, with a focus on how race, class, and gender shape the exclusion, punishment, and criminalization of Latino youth. Specifically, his research examines the durability of systems of inequality as they relate to evolving systems of social control in institutions, like schools, that claim to be working toward becoming more inclusive. Findings from this work illuminate hidden forms of inequality through consideration of how neglect functions as an essential mechanism for maintaining what is perceived to be a successful and productive school environment. Jonathan’s research has been supported by the American Sociological Association’s Minority Fellowship Program and the UC Office of the President’s Pre-Professoriate Fellowship, among others. His research on racial inequalities in policing and education has been published in the American Sociological Review and the Journal for Criminal Justice Education. He was also awarded the 2020 Article of the Year award from the American Sociological Association’s Latina/o Sociology section, along with his co-authors.
He also earned his BA and MA in sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he served as an undergraduate representative on the Hispanic Serving Institute committee and as a McNair’s Scholar Program Graduate Research Mentor. As a community-engaged scholar, Jonathan has continuously mentored marginalized youth through volunteer work with schools and community organizations. He has also helped secure grants to fund youth programs.