Interdisciplinary Studies Field

After graduating in 2014, Adam Oriel Cohen became a Fellow in Public Affairs at CORO which is a highly selective, full-time, nine month, graduate-level experiential leadership training program that prepares diverse, talented and committed individuals for effective and ethical leadership in the public affairs arena. In 2017 Adam began the study of law at UCLA. Adam’s thesis was a comprehensive comparative investigation of the history and effectiveness of remedial programs in the CUNY and the California State University systems. As an undergraduate Adam was a Research Apprentice to Professor David

Emily will begin her Master’s degree in Occupational Therapy at USC in the Fall of 2015 and may continue for a third year to receive a Ph.D. As part of her admission package, Emily has been awarded a research opporunity in the Pediatric Department with Professor Sharon Cermak. Emily summarizes her 2014 thesis: In 1975 the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, addressed the inaccessibility of education for children with disabilities by requiring that all children with disabilities be provided a free appropriate public education (FAPE) (Individuals with Disability Education

Emma Shaw Crane won the University Medal in 2009. After graduating from UC Berkeley in 2009, she was a Judith Lee Stronach Baccalaureate Fellow in Southern Mexico and Central America, where she helped to coordinate a series of popular education and community radio workshops for indigenous and Garifuna peoples organizations. The following year, she was a Fulbright Scholar to Colombia, where she worked with the Critical Medical Anthropology Group at the National University in Bogota. With her colleague Camilo Ruz, she did a yearlong ethnography of the young families of

After graduating from UC Berkeley in 2011, Stephanie went on to pursue a Master’s degree at SDA Bocconi School of Management in Milan, Italy. Her degree was in International Healthcare Management, Economics and Policy, with a specialization in Global Health and Development. In her final term, she had the opportunity to intern at the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) in New York. During her internship, she worked extensively with the malaria team, learning about seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) and the pilot study CHAI was launching in Nigeria to determine the

Philine graduated in Spring 2018, receiving the ISF departmental citation award. Her senior thesis, Primary Care Deserts: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Primary Care Physician Shortages in California, explores the relationship between primary care practitioner supply and health outcomes in the 58 California counties. While at Cal, Philine was a member of the club rowing team, worked as a resident assistant in the dorms and volunteered at a special needs aquatics program. Since graduating, she has been working as a behavioral therapist for children on the Autism spectrum. In the

A 2019 graduate, Katrina’s thesis title was “The Effects of Community Education Nonprofits on Social Inequities and Marginalized Students.” Her research focused on the approaches and structures of several community education nonprofits and various forms of education public policies, analyzing how they affected their target beneficiaries and combatted educational and social disparities. During her tenure at UC Berkeley she won the Hikoyeda Scholarship, Calmerton Scholarship, and the Goldaracena Scholarship. She also studied abroad in Madrid, Spain, and wrote for The Daily Californian and had had articles published on The San

Maleah is a spring 2017 graduate who has been accepted to the Sociology Ph.D. program at Harvard University. The title of her thesis is “Leisure Motivations: Romance Reading in 1984 and Today”. Her list of awards include the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) and the Institute of International Studies Junior Scholarship. She participated in the Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program (URAP) with Professor Winne Wong and conducted independent research with Professor Niklaus Lagier. For Maleah: “Choosing to major in ISF has been one of the best decision of my undergraduate experience.

Graduating in Spring 2016, Varada will be joining Facebook as a product designer with the business applications team, where she hopes to work on the platform used by news media outlets and other publishers. Her senior thesis was about the future of journalism and how social media news coverage affected public perception of the ongoing Syrian civil war and the resulting migrant crisis. Varada examined the way filtering and ranking algorithms as well as the low barrier to participation in news via sharing and commenting polarized opinion and ultimately affected

While also winning the Florence Palmer Prize in Political Science in 2014 for her work on NGOs, Tali wrote her ISF thesis on constructions of gender relations among different ethnicities living in rural communities in the San Martin region of Peru in order to understand how gender and ethnicity play a role in survival strategies for these communities and how gender and ethnic constructions relate to the development of economic and political structures. Based on fieldwork conducted in this region, she analyzed the ways in which these mestizo and indigenous

Gianni will enter Brown Alpert Medical School in the Fall of 2015.Gianni writes that he began the ISF major at Berkeley without a clear sense of direction but eventually decided to concentrate his studies around the question What makes people heal?. He took courses in cognitive science, psychology, social theory, and anthropology. Gianni writes: In my junior year, I stumbled on the placebo effect and devoted my thesis research to exploring and expanding an evolutionary explanation for why and how people heal when there is no active intervention administered. A