Student Profiles

Andrea is a fourth-year transfer majoring in English. Her research considers a battery of US laws that significantly reduced Mexican-Americans’ property rights and legal status throughout the nineteenth century. When the United States and Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the peace treaty promised that Mexicans who suddenly lived in the United States of America would retain the privileges that they previously enjoyed pertaining to citizenship and property. Yet, empirical records show this is not the case. Property battles loom over Mexican-American author María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novel The Squatter and the Don. Set in post-Mexican-American War California, landowning Mexican-American families confront new laws regarding their properties, which Articles VIII, IX, and X of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo previously secured. Even more frustrating to many Mexican-American land-owning elites, these new laws reflected a change in the American mindset. Anglo-Americans no longer thought of formerly white-passing Mexican-Americans as equal in terms of standing before the law and “whiteness.” This research project examines the ways and extent to which Ruiz de Burton’s novel expresses such legal and social changes, closely scrutinizing primary and secondary sources to more completely understand citizenship for Californios in the nineteenth century.

Arta moved to the US from Tehran, Iran around four years ago and transferred to the UCLA film program last year. Although he is in the production track of the film program, he independently researches the cinema of Sohrab Shahid Saless, an Iranian filmmaker who emerged in the early 1970s. Saless was the founder of realist cinema in Iran and one of the early practitioners of the “slow cinema” style globally. He was a major figure of the Iranian New Wave, then moved to Germany and made over 10 films.

Arta worked with Professor Anderson at UCLA and Professor Varzi at UCI last spring and will continue to seek the guidance of Professor Anderson in the current year. He presented his research at the Visions 9 Film Festival and Conference in North Carolina in the spring and is currently in talks with Paul Malcolm, the head of programming at the UCLA Film and TV Archive about a possible Saless retrospective at UCLA sometime within the next year. The journal Film Matters is currently considering part of his research for publication in their next issue.

Therese Boles is a fourth-year history student at UCLA. She loves reading old newspapers and studying America’s Gilded Age (1865-1900). These interests converge to form her senior thesis topic: the role of newspapers at the Homestead Strike at Andrew Carnegie’s steel mill in 1892. While this strike is well studied in scholarly literature, no study has yet focused on the press—an oversight that Therese argues detracts from our understanding of the event. By recounting the role of reporters and newspapers at Homestead in 1892, comparing how the news coverage changed based on the source, and tracking how people responded to that news, Therese hopes to tell an exciting story while adding to the historiography of this famous event.

Jennifer is a fourth-year Psychology major. She is a research assistant for Dr. Anna Lau’s Culture and Minority Mental Health Lab, where her research experience centers on minority mental health. From assisting on a project examining the collaborative relationship between community therapists and Latinx parents of children treated with evidence-based practices, Jennifer has diverse experience ranging from comprehensive literature reviews to observational coding of therapy sessions. Last year, she completed an independent project about the relationship between stressful life events and emotional/behavioral functioning in low-income Asian-American and Latinx youth through the competitive Psychology Research Opportunity Program. Currently, with support from the Undergraduate Research Scholars Program, Jennifer conducts another independent project on the potential benefits of racial/ethnic match and therapist acculturation for treatment engagement of Latinx families served in Los Angeles County. As a first-generation Latina college student and young researcher, her long-term goal is to enter a doctoral program in Clinical Psychology where she can conduct interdisciplinary research to examine how practitioners can leverage culture to mitigate youth mental health problems.

Haocong Cheng, born in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, is a senior majoring in History. His honors thesis explores the theoretical framework of the Chinese Re-education through Labor (Laojiao) system from the late 1950s to the early 1960s and analyzes the gap between the system’s ideal and practice. Taking a vertical approach to understand the Re-education through Labor system in practice, he divides the detainees into three categories: prestigious ones such as the last emperor, Puyi; less famous elites including a CCP cadre and a professor of English; and ordinary people, including former detainees he interviewed. His thesis takes a horizontal approach to understand the practice of the system by looking at examples of Re-education through Labor camps in Inner Mongolia, Sichuan, Beijing, and Gansu. Through probing a wide range of materials including memoirs, documentary films, declassified personal documents, and reportage literature, Cheng questions whether the practice of the penal system achieved the PRC’s goal to reform detainees and turn them into socialist citizens through a combination of education and manual labor.

Nida Choudary is a fourth-year English major. Her honors thesis researches works about South Asian Muslims living in the west. Her project confronts questions about assimilation after 9/11 and its complication in an age of fear and racialization. Furthermore, she explores what American identity is after 9/11 and who has access to it. She studies these questions through two novels: Home Fire and The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Her goal is to pursue graduate studies and track the development of South Asian Muslim literature from the 20^th century to the contemporary age of Brexit and ISIS.

Hetvi Doshi is a fourth-year Cognitive Science major with a specialization in computing. She is an international student from India and has loved her journey at UCLA. She is developing a new paradigm for affective researchers through her honors thesis. This paradigm will consist of stimuli that can consistently and repeatedly elicit social emotions such as outrage.

Carissa Ferguson is a fourth-year undergraduate student majoring in Political Science with a concentration in International Relations conducting research as part of the Departmental Honors program. Her research project, titled “The Effects of Taxation on Social and Economic Well-Being,” is a comparative analysis of 36 countries involving the causal relationship between taxation and well-being. More specifically, she asks the question, “Does a higher level of taxation, as percent of GDP, lead or contribute to better outcomes of social and economic well-being within a country?” Through her analysis, she hopes to gain insight into the most effective and optimal federal tax structures, while identifying flaws and weaknesses of existing systems. Her investigation of this issue is both qualitative and quantitative in nature, with the goal of her findings informing the development and revision of future tax policies in both developed and developing nations. She hopes to continue her studies and build upon her research while pursuing her PhD following graduation this spring.

Meagan Ford is a fifth-year History and Russian Studies double major. Her research project is her senior thesis “From Nomads to ‘New Soviet Men’: The Urbanization of Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, 1937.” Alma-Ata was the capital of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and experienced both great urban buildup and a staggering loss of human life under Stalin, whose system of mass terror reached its apex in 1937. One factor in this was the moving of mass numbers of traditionally nomadic Kazakhs into settled communities like Alma-Ata. Using archival documents from the Almaty (Alma-Ata) city archive in Kazakhstan, Meagan tells the story of how one state construction company, Alma-Ata Stroi, navigated competing demands and pressures by Moscow authorities and the realities of the attempts on the ground to complete its urbanizing mission.

Matthew Gilbert is a fourth-year transfer student from San Diego, California majoring in Musicology. His research aspires to build meaningful ways of connecting with people through musical experiences and rectify the inherent gaps in musical canons, which are designed to exclude, by creating space for musicians who have traditionally been undervalued. For his senior capstone project, he is excavating the life of Sachiko Kanenobu, a Japanese musician whose pioneering work as the first woman in Japan to write and release her own songs has been overlooked in the academic narrative of Japanese music. He explores alternatives to traditional models of musical biography and canonicity by incorporating oral history into an ethnographic biography. He is interested in applied methodologies whose impact is felt outside of the university, where his work is directly beneficial to those persons with whom he engages in his research. Part of his project will include archiving Kanenobu’s work and bringing her to UCLA for a performance. He hopes this project will bring awareness to musicians outside of the traditional narrative and create a compelling framework for other scholars to use. He is grateful to be the 2019-2020 recipient of the Arjay and Frances Fearing Miller Scholarship for his research.

Emiliano Gomez is from Marysville, CA, a small town off the 99 surrounded by orchards, just north of the Capitol, a working class community that motivated his creative writing thesis and research. He double majors in English (with a concentration in Creative Writing) and Linguistics & French (with a specialization in Computing). The working title of his thesis is “An Elegy for Middle America.” His thesis elaborates that—based on empirical evidence—the state of man is a failed state.

Gomez’s work aims to prove that the goal of man is to be his unique expression, unique being. Proving that this goal is unaccomplished, Gomez attempts to derive how man failed, which influences were too overpowering, experiences too severely damaging; and decisively concludes that family and culture have left us with the unexpressed man, the middle American.

After graduation, Gomez aims to achieve Aristotelian magnificence.

Jannet Esmeralda Gomez is a fourth-year undergraduate student majoring in Political Science with a concentration in race, ethnicity, and politics, and minoring in Asian Cultures and Languages. She credits her background as the daughter to once-undocumented immigrants and her upbringing in a low-income city in Los Angeles as the main inspiration for her academic and research interests. Her research focuses on how undocumented immigrants politically mobilize in the United States. With the help of her faculty mentor, Professor Natalie Masuoka, Jannet’s project explores what motivating factors have or have not encouraged undocumented individuals to increase their visibility in the political stage. The William M. Ortega and Rosalind W. Alcott scholarships are supporting her academic career. In the future, she hopes to pursue a doctorate in Political Science.

Abigail Gonzalez Bejarano is a fourth-year completing her degree in Psychology with a minor in Chicanx Studies. Dating back to her high-school days, she knew that she wanted to work with underprivileged communities in the area of mental health. Coming from a low-income neighborhood, she saw and experienced firsthand the need for advocacy of mental health services in black and brown communities. Her experiences of watching her community and its disadvantages, combined with what she learned in classes, led her to discover the world of research in minority mental health.

Her research project investigates the extent to which school climate, parental involvement, and exposure to community violence influence mental health difficulties in youth. Given the critical role of mental health in the school-to-prison pipeline within high-need communities, it is important to identify where interventions should be prioritized. Based on the literature review she has done, factors like school climate/inclusion affect how students feel and behave at school. This is important when justifying dropout rates and implementing interventions.

Valda Han is a fourth-year Psychobiology student researching family dynamics in Dr. Rena Repetti’s clinical psychology lab under the guidance of Galen McNeil and Dr. Repetti. Her participation in the Psychology Research Opportunities Program during her third year at UCLA, during which she studied how mothers’ depressive symptoms affect their children’s socioemotional development, ignited her passion for clinical psychology research. Her current research project for the Undergraduate Research Scholars Program revolves around instances of compassion between married couples in the Los Angeles area. Using videos collected from a large-scale study conducted by the Center on the Everyday Lives of Families at UCLA, she observes different aspects of marital compassion, such as how couples display marital compassion and how partners respond to each other’s compassion. She hopes to be able to connect her project to the broader scheme of family dynamics, in particular how marital compassion affects the couple and their family. In the future, she aspires to earn a PhD in Clinical Psychology and pursue a career in academia or clinical work.

Olivia Hansen is a fourth-year International Development Studies major, Global Citizens Fellow, and co-founder of Love a Community, an NGO focused on sustainable community development in Kumi, Uganda. Since transferring to UCLA, she has been a member of the Global Development Lab and the Olive Tree Initiative as well as a research intern for the African Studies Center. Her URSP project inquires whether there is a gap in support for the male refugee population in Uganda, and if so, what short and long-term effects are perceivable. After spending this past summer in Uganda conducting field research in the Rhino Refugee Settlement, her hypothesis proved to be accurate: there is a large gap in supportive programming for the male refugee population alongside quantifiable, detrimental consequences stemming from the failure to engage men in women’s empowerment initiatives.