People
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Aileen Anderson
Professor of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation
Associate Director, Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Center
Director, Christopher Reeve Foundation Spinal Cord Injury Core Facility
Spinal Cord Injury, Human CNS Stem Cell Engraftment in the Injured CNS, Mechanisms for Promotion of Neurological Recovery -
Hillary Berk
Assistant Professor of Teaching
Criminology, Law and SocietySociology of Law/Law and Society, Gender, Family, Assisted Reproduction and Surrogacy, Law and Emotion, Civil Rights, Dispute Resolution
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Alejandro Camacho
Professor of Law
Director, Center for Land, Environment, and Natural Resources
Environmental Law, Natural Resource Law, Land Use Regulation, Regulatory Design, Government Organization -
Elizabeth Cauffman
Professor of Psychology & Social Behavior and Education
Adolescent Development, Mental Health, Juvenile Justice, Legal and Social Policy -
Brian J. Cummings
Associate Professor of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, Anatomy & Neurobiology
Associate Director, Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Center
Derivation and characterization of ES, iPS, and adult neural stem cell lines, interaction between human neural stem cells and the injured CNS, therapeutic use of human neural stem cells using in vitro models and in vivo models of disease -
Wendy Goldberg
Professor of Psychology & Social Behavior and Education
Developmental Psychology, Work and Family, Infant Sleep, Transition to Parenthood -
Sidney H. Golub
Research Professor, Microbiology & Molecular Genetics, School of Medicine
Director, Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center
Science Policy, Stem Cell Policy, Research Ethics, NK Lymphocytes, Cancer Immunotherapy -
Kaaryn Gustafson
Professor of Law
Director, Center on Law, Equality and Race (CLEaR)
Welfare and Economic Policy, Criminal Law and Procedure, Interdisciplinary Research on Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Socioeconomic Inequality -
Laura Hyun Yi Kang
Chair & Associate Professor, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Associate Professor, Comparative Literature and English
Feminist and Gender Studies, Feminist Epistemologies and Theories, Political Economies of Globalization, Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies -
Elizabeth Loftus
Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Social Behavior, Professor of Law
Eyewitness Testimony, Psychology and Law, Human Memory -
Andrew Noymer
Associate Professor, Public Health
Health and Mortality, Selective Mortality, Multi-Cause Interaction, Demography, Mathematical Sociology -
Bryan Sykes
Assistant Professor of Criminology, Law & Society
Demography, Punishment and Mass Incarceration, Health, Fertility, Research Methods, Statistics, Social Inequality -
Shauhin Talesh
Assistant Professor of Law
Joint appointment in Law, and Criminology, Law & Society, and Sociology
Insurance Law, Organizations, Consumer Law, Civil Procedure, Law and Organizations, Legal Mobilization -
Kristin Turney
Associate Professor of Sociology
Social Inequality, Child Wellbeing, Population Health, Incarceration and Punishment, Intergenerational Transmission of Disadvantage
Affiliated Faculty
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Hon. Lynne Riddle (Ret.)
Lynne Riddle was appointed to the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California in 1988 and served until her retirement in 2002. Before her appointment to the bench, she practiced law in Santa Ana as a sole practitioner. During that time, she developed a special interest in bankruptcy fraud and often served as special counsel to bankruptcy trustees.
Judge Riddle has remained active in the pursuit of justice. In 2004, she traveled to Oregon to serve as the AFL-CIO's Election Protection Coordinator for four months. Since 2014, she has been involved with the Community Action Fund Board for Planned Parenthood throughout the Orange and San Bernardino counties.
She started her career in education and taught educational philosophy at various universities, including Syracuse University, California State University, Long Beach, The University of Iowa and Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
She earned her J.D. from the University of California, Hastings School of Law, her Ed.D. from Syracuse University, and was a post-doctoral scholar in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Tasha Green Cruzat
Senior Fellow
Tasha Green Cruzat, a United States Navy military veteran, has more than 30 years of experience in the non-profit, public, and private sectors of business, education and government. She is the former Executive Director of Voices for Illinois Children. She scored several major Illinois legislative victories including the signing of the Illinois Racial Impact Note Act, April 2021. Tasha also served as the Deputy Chief of Staff, then Chief of Staff to the Cook County Board President where she was responsible for overseeing county departments with a total operating budget of $4.2 billion. Previously, Tasha served as Senior Management Advisor in the Illinois Governor's Office of Management and Budget, and as Chief Operating Officer for the Illinois Department of Central Management Services with an operating budget of $4.5 billion.
Tasha is a board member for the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum and board co-chair for the Partnership for America's Children in Washington, DC. She is a member of the prestigious International Women's Forum. In 2019, she was honored and named Chicago Defender's Women of Excellence. Tasha was also selected as a University of Illinois, Institute of Government and Public Affairs 2021 Edgar Fellow.
She is currently pursuing her doctoral studies at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody School of Education.
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Mariah A. Lindsay
Center Fellow
Prior to joining the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy, Mariah was a staff attorney at the California Women’s Law Center, where she engaged in legal and policy work related to Title IX, reproductive health and rights, and landlord-tenant law. Mariah previously served as an If/When/How Reproductive Justice Federal Fellow with the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum in Washington, D.C. where she worked on matters related to racial justice, economic justice, immigrant rights, and reproductive health, rights, and justice. As a fellow, Mariah engaged in legal and policy work, including researching and drafting public comments, amicus briefs, fact sheets, and know-your-rights materials.
She earned her Juris Doctor from the University of California, Irvine School of Law in 2018 and her Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, summa cum laude, from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona in 2015. During law school, Mariah served as a research assistant to Professor Michele Goodwin, contributing to a 9th Circuit Amicus Brief in addition to law review articles and books. Mariah was a Summer Law Clerk in the Complex Litigation Unit at the Riverside County Public Defender’s Office and served as a Spitzer Intern at the National Health Law Program, focusing on law and policy surrounding contraceptive equity laws, maternal health, family planning, and Medicaid.
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Zoë Miller-Vedam
Center Fellow
Zoë Miller-Vedam is doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. She received her BA in Political Science from McGill University and an L.L.M in International Human Rights Law from the University of Leicester in the UK. Her LLM research examined the impacts of dominant culture-based citizenship tests on immigrant exclusion and integration. Her research areas of interest at UCI are immigration, gender and reproductive health. Specifically, her research focuses on how immigration legal status shapes access to maternal and reproductive healthcare in the US, UK and Canada.
Since 2012, Zoë has held various positions in global reproductive health policy and advocacy. In her role as Project Coordinator for the Provincial Health Services Authority in British Columbia, Canada, she worked on perinatal health service coordination programs, including initiatives to improve evidence-based care for pregnant women with substance use challenges, and programs for the better integration of midwives into the provincial health system. She served as a Strategic Consultant for advocacy programs for the international NGO, Human Rights in Childbirth. With HRiC, she convened multi-stakeholder meetings in India, France and the US on optimizing respectful, culturally sensitive and human rights based perinatal care. During the past year, Zoë has been an active member of the Quality and Rights Subcommittee of the Global Perinatal Taskforce on COVID-19. Working with a group of lawyers and policy experts, this committee curated law and policy documents globally relevant to perinatal healthcare provision during COVID and developed a quality metric to assess health information using a human rights and equity lens.
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Dr. Shyamala Rajender
Senior Fellow
Dr. Shyamala Rajender, an emigree from South India, is a former university professor, and now a practicing lawyer, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her practice includes intellectual property, litigation involving employment discrimination based on gender, race, religion, national origin, color, sexual orientation etc. She obtained her Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in physical chemistry from the University of Wyoming, Laramie, and completed a three-year post-doctoral stint at the University of Minnesota under the guidance of Professor Rufus Lumry. She has taught American law and English to students from various universities in the former Soviet Union, Poland, Austria, Czech Republic and India.
She is known as the trail blazer in bringing a class-action lawsuit against the University of Minnesota for discrimination based on her gender and national origin, resulting in a major resounding victory, the first of its kind in the nation, that sent shock waves through all academic institutions and “igniting a fire that has been likened to a fire burning in a coal mine that cannot be put out, although things appear to be normal on the surface.”
Shyamala has recently published a book titled "Up Against The Ivory Tower" where she describes what she had to go through to fight the mighty university in a federal court and her resounding first of its kind victory.
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Monica Ramsey
Center Fellow
Monica Ramsy is a storyteller, advocate, and educator currently pursuing her J.D. at the University of California Berkeley School of Law. After earning her B.A. in Gender Studies (with a minor in Natural Sciences) from the University of Southern California, Monica worked as a campus organizer for the Feminist Majority Foundation, as a sexual health educator for Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, and as a researcher at UCLA's Iris Cantor Women's Health Education and Research Center.
As a law student at Boalt, Monica works as a member of the Oakland Law Collective’s anti-sexual harassment and gender discrimination initiative, as a member of The Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Law, and as part of Berkeley Law’s Juvenile Education Advocacy Project. Monica is particularly passionate about anti-oppression work that focuses on the intersections between sexual health and mental health in communities of color. Ultimately, Monica hopes to translate her passion for feminist activism into a career devoted to promoting the sexual, emotional, and communal health of diasporic communities and other communities of color through a career in feminist, sociological, humanity(ies)-driven legal scholarship and advocacy.
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Antwann Michael Simpkins
Center Fellow
Antwann Michael Simpkins is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his BA and MA in African American Studies from Morehouse College (Atlanta, GA) and the UCLA (Los Angeles, CA), respectively. Antwann’s research and advocacy work is located at the intersection of Race, Gender, Law, and Society. His specified areas of expertise are carceraltiy, Black feminist thought, race and ethnicity, law and society, critical race theory, gender, as well as urban and suburban sociology. His current research project examines the experiences of Black women with carcerality. By moving attention to the experiences of women with incarceration Antwann conceptualizes carcerality in alternative and various geographical spaces and locations, as opposed to being limited to the physical structure of the prison.
Aside from his studies as a student Antwann also serves as a lecturer at UCLA and Los Angeles Valley College where he teaches on various issues concerning justice, recognition, sexism, racism, and the contemporary condition. Antwann has also given several keynote addresses as well as hosted workshops and panels concerning race, gender, and society.
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Merima Tricic
Senior Fellow
Merima Tricic is a second-year PhD student in the department of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine. Currently, her research is centered on organizational efforts to integrate sexual violence survivor narratives into policy campaigns relating to post-war reparations in Bosnia. More specifically, Merima works with organizations in Bosnia, such as TRIAL and Medica Zenica, to collaboratively research how survivor stories can be utilized to create policy changes regarding memorializing spaces with histories of wartime sexual violence and in bringing awareness to the problematic reparations policies that do not have accountability mechanisms to enforce policies established to respond to the needs of survivors and their families. Merima has additionally worked on a multitude of gender-based issues, such as projects related to underage marriage policies, female genital mutilation prevention in D.C., sexual violence awareness in Muslim families and teens, and in domestic violence issues relating to the COVID-19 pandemic. Merima is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, where she completed her undergraduate studies, and Brandeis University, where she completed graduate studies. She is a former Fellow at the Cambridge University Security Initiative.
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Christopher Williams
Center Research Fellow
Chris is an advocate and scholar currently pursuing his Ph.D. in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Chris earned his J.D. from the University of California-Irvine School of Law. He studies interlocking oppressions that disproportionately impact vulnerable populations. His work seeks to address these concerns in communities of color. His research and scholarship address state violence, education inequity, housing segregation and their intersections with oppressed identities.
His recent scholarship uncovers the ways in which the law exacerbates existing systems of inequality such as racism, classism, sexism, ableism, and homophobia.
During his matriculation at UCI Law, Chris worked to bring innovation and anti-oppression praxis to the campus. He created and spearheaded BLSA’s Nuanced Visions Film Festival, critically engaging viewers on issues such as race, class, gender, immigrations, sexuality, and class. In addition, as the Co-chair of UCI Law’s BLSA, Chris created the organization's first in-house academic skills program and oversaw its first scholarship awards gala. While earning his B.A. in Sociology from the University of Missouri, he played an active role in the student led engagements which resulted in new UM system leadership.
Center Fellows
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Nassim Alisobhani
CBGHP Coordinator
Before joining the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy Nassim was an associate at Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP, where she worked on corporate and intellectual property matters. She earned her Juris Doctor from UC Irvine School of Law in 2017 and her Bachelors of Arts in Critical Theory and Middle East Studies from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Studies in 2012. She previously worked for the Obama White House, first as an intern for the Chief of Staff and then as an Advance Associate until 2016. She externed for Judge John B. Owens of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2015. A passionate believer in the pivotal role that elections play in creating social change, Nassim worked for the DNC’s Voter Protection team in 2020 and, in law school, served as a research assistant for election law scholar, Professor Richard Hasen. Nassim is the author of the note “Female Toplessness: Gender Equality’s Next Frontier,” which is cited by many scholars in this field and in several briefs for the Supreme Court of the United States. In her spare time, Nassim enjoys reading and writing mystery stories and spending time with her husband and beloved dog, Luna.