Transatlantic Fellows Program

Jennifer Allsopp
Co-Convener

Jennifer’s research centers on how people move and mobilize to support what they perceive to be viable futures for themselves, their families and their societies in the context of migration. Her most recent work explores the relationship between immigration control, welfare and wellbeing, with a focus on gender, aging, and the politics of membership and belonging. She is passionate about comparative studies in international migration and the pursuit of innovative methodologies and is currently collaborating with colleagues across five continents to develop a new toolkit for ethical and effective migration research partnerships.

Jennifer is a regular advisor to the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties (LIBE) Committee on ethics, anti-smuggling and human rights and has contributed to multiple government inquiries into migration and the human rights of children and young people. Her current work looks at storytelling and survival, seeking to bridge her background in the social sciences and the humanities in a forthcoming monograph, Reading Dante with Refugees.

Roberto G. Gonzales
Co-Convener

Roberto G. Gonzales is the Richard Perry University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with appointments in the Department of Sociology and the Graduate School of Education. His research focuses on factors that shape and reduce economic, legal, and social inequalities among vulnerable and hard-to-reach youth populations as they transition to adulthood. Professor Gonzales’s work has been featured in top journals, including the American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, and Current Anthropology. His published research has been widely cited and has garnered awards from multiple disciplines. He is an active public scholar and has advised a broad range of stakeholders in the private and public sectors, has briefed members of the U.S. Congress, and has testified on matters of immigration policy before the U.S. Senate. He has also written opinion pieces for The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and The Guardian and is often quoted in the popular media.

At Penn, Professor Gonzales is the founding director of the newly formed Penn Migration Initiative, a university-wide effort aimed at advancing and promoting interdisciplinary scholarship and intellectual exchange around issues of immigration policy and immigrant communities. Prior to his appointment at Penn, Professor Gonzales held faculty positions at Harvard University, the University of Chicago and the University of Washington. His research has been supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the WT Grant Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, and the Heising-Simons Foundation.

Irina Chukhray
Co-Coordinator

Irina Chukhray is a PhD candidate in sociology at University of California, Davis. Her mixed-method research examines immigrant youths’ experience in their college-going process. Specifically, she studies supports and constraints in access to higher education as well as wellbeing among 1.5-generation immigrant youth (foreign-born students who arrived in the US prior to age 18).

Prior to graduate school, Chukhray was the Program Manager for an international collaborative study with OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) on students’ socioemotional skills and a Research Analyst for the Houston Education Research Consortium at Rice University (directed by Dr. Ruth N. López Turley).

Program Manager for OECD study. Chukhray led a team composed of Rice University researchers and Houston Independent School District (HISD) stakeholders in surveying students’ social and emotional skills, information that was previously unavailable to HISD, one of the largest school districts in the US. Houston was the only city representing the US in the international study of 10 countries. Chukhray led the team in surveying about 1,500 students in 32 schools (obtained an 87% student response rate). Chukhray also collaborated and negotiated with school district partners, such as with the Assistant Superintendent of Research and Accountability for HISD and with international partners such as the OECD in France and the Australian Council for Education Research in Australia.
Research Analyst at HERC. Chukhray conducted research examining high school students’ challenges in navigating their post-secondary educational path, tested a stereotype threat intervention designed to boost students’ academic performance, and examined the nuances of students sharing the race/ethnicity of their teacher.
Chukhray’s work led to meaningful change: findings from her HERC research aided the Houston school district in applying for and receiving state funding to hire additional college advisors in order to make advising more equitable. Additionally, the OECD study provided the Houston school district with its first tools to measure students’ socioemotional well-being.

Melisa Argañaraz Gomez

Melisa is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her current areas of research include urban geography, Latin American feminisms (Feminismos del Abya Yala), migration studies, and critical race theory with a focus on young people. Her research examines how racialized (im)migrant Latin American children and youth experience, negotiate, challenge narratives of deservingness in cities that promote migration for urban development. She explores how Black, Brown, and Indigenous (im)migrant youth build community, create spaces of care, reciprocity, and solidarity to achieve migrant justice in spaces of erasure. Her research contributes to how we theorize about (im)migrant children and youth and to challenge western terms like citizenship. In her research, she employs a variety of community-based action methods. Some of her projects include “All about Baltimore Map” in partnership with Latinx summer scholars in Centro Sol- Center of Salud/Health for Latinos and “Parqueologia Migrante” (parqueologiamigrante.com) in collaboration with al Latinas Migrantes and CASA de Maryland. Her research is funded by the Dresher Center for Humanities at UMBC, Baltimore Field School, and UUSC Participatory Action Research Grant.

She earned a BS in Sociology at the University of Granada, and she holds a master’s degree in Urban Sociology from the University of Amsterdam.
Photo credit: Mariana Orellana

Ludmila Bogdan

Ludmila Bogdan’s research centers on the interplay of labor migration, human trafficking, and migration information campaigns in Europe. She has a Ph.D. in Political Sciences from the University of Vienna and Postdoctoral Training in Sociology from Harvard University. Her recent work uncovers why poorer people aspire less to migrate than those from wealthier economic backgrounds in Moldova. Currently, Ludmila is conducting field research in Palermo (Italy) to understand the migration imaginaries of African youth as they navigate the immigration system and life in a new country. She held academic positions at Harvard University, Max Planck Institute, Georgetown University, University of Vienna, and Diplomatic Academy of Vienna. In addition, Ludmila gained practical experience in multilateral diplomacy and international security through positions at the Women in International Security – Austria, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Moldova, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the Citizens Network for Foreign Affairs, and the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.

Estefanía Castañeda Pérez

Estefanía Castañeda Pérez is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Penn Migration Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. Trained as an interdisciplinary scholar in political science, her research interests include border policing, mental health among transborder populations, the conceptualization and consequences of violence, and border politics. Her dissertation examined how the lives of transborder commuters are impacted by their border crossing experiences and interactions with U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers. Her research has been supported by the APSA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Her work has been published in Politics, Groups, and Identities, and in academic blogs such as NACLA and the NYU Latinx Project Intervenxions Blog. Castañeda Pérez has a master’s degree in political science from UCLA, and a bachelor’s degree in political science with an honors minor in interdisciplinary studies from San Diego State University.

Marie Clancy

Marie’s work to date clinically has focused on paediatric oncology and palliative care, with a focus on cultural dimensions and influences. Her master’s in Public Health expanded upon this clinical work with a dissertation focusing on children’s pain in Sub Saharan Africa. Marie has worked in academic nurse education roles for the last 12 years and currently works at the University of Exeter as a Senior Lecturer in the Academy of Nursing and as the nursing Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) lead.

Marie’s PhD work explores the experiences of asylum seeker and refugee families in children’s palliative care services. The study uses Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis methodology to explore the lived experiences of families and the staff who care for them in hospital, hospice and community care. Marie also utilises creative arts-based research approaches including the creation of poetic works with family members and advisory groups to aid expression and enhance understanding of their experiences. Advisory group members from different perspectives including palliative care, children and young people’s health, bereaved parents and refugee associations are crucial to this study and work closely with Marie to share their expertise and help inform the study from commencement to study recommendations.

Dylan Farrell-Bryan

​​Dylan Farrell-Bryan is currently a J.D. candidate at Yale Law School. Her research examines the intersection of immigration, labor, and administrative law, with particular attention to how recent changes in agency enforcement have remapped the immigration court process in the United States. Her work has been published in Law & Society Review, Annual Review of Sociology, Socius, and Health Affairs. Dylan has her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Kristina Fullerton Rico

Kristina Fullerton Rico is a Sociology Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her ethnographic research focuses on the experiences of unauthorized Mexican immigrants and their families who are physically divided –– due to the tightening Mexico–U.S. border –– but digitally close thanks to accessible communication technologies. Kristina’s Master’s thesis found that mothers with children on either side of the border use technology to forge bonds of “digital siblinghood” between siblings who have never met. Her dissertation focuses on the experiences of older adults who are aging while undocumented. Using a transnational lens, this project examines how individuals cope with social exclusion and uncertainty, as well as sources of social support for older immigrants in the United States and for older return migrants in Mexico.

If Kristina had to sum up the key takeaways from her research in just a few lines, she would explain that most migrants who are undocumented hope to adjust their status in order to be able to return to their communities of origin without having to leave the United States for good. In short, unauthorized immigrants are not just afraid of being deported; they also fear not being able to see the people they love — in both of their home countries — again. Kristina’s research has been supported by Sociologists for Women in Society.

Giovanna Gini

Giovanna Gini is a researcher focusing on human (im)mobilities in the Anthropocene, particularly in the ‘Global South’. She holds a PhD in Human Geography from Queen Mary University of London and received a scholarship from the Leverhulme Trust Doctoral – QMUL-LTDS program. Her doctoral thesis is titled “The intertwined (im)mobilities of Enseada da Baleia in the Anthropocene: A relational story of humans, fish, and water.” Giovanna has contributed to various international publishing platforms, including Forced Migration magazine and Routledge publisher. Additionally, she is a member of the South American Network of Environmental Migrations (RESAMA).

Nuni Jorgensen

Nuni Jorgensen is a Geography PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and a Leverhulme doctoral scholar. She holds a M.A in Demography from the Centre for Development and Regional Planning (Cedeplar, Brazil). Before starting her PhD at QMUL, Nuni worked as Population Data and Research advisor at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), where she specialised in the monitoring and evaluation of projects focused on human mobility. Her research interests include transnational families, care, migration governance and the temporalities of migration. Her doctoral research analyses how transnational Venezuelan families negotiate migration and care in contexts of political and economic uncertainty.

Leslie S. Molina

Leslie S. Molina is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Glasgow. She holds a Masters in Migration, Superdiversity and Policy from the University of Birmingham and obtained her Bachelor’s (dual degree) in Philosophy, Politics and Law and Sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Her current research focuses on a transatlantic analysis of the UK’s and US’s migration policies and enforcement actions. More specifically, her research is a comparative analysis of meso-level, between politics and everyday life, in which migration policies are articulated on the grounds of the state-promoted and state-regulated notions of rights and law. Legal practitioners working within the confines of the laws and politics of migration challenge and negotiate such notions and practices. Her research provides a meso-level analytical exploration on litigation strategies, their underpinning ideologies and aims vis-a-vis state regulations and policies, which she sees as emanations of the racial state, ruled by nationalist leadership. By uncovering such ideologies and strategies of support, her research will provide a particularized account of how the racial state is mediated and how state-legal and policy racism is challenged in practice. Leslie also works part-time, remotely, at the Neighbors Link Community Law Practice, located in Ossining, N.Y., as a Department of Justice Accredited Representative where she provides pro bono immigration legal representation to immigrants in the community.

Briana Nichols

Briana Nichols received a joint Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Education and the department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.   She is currently a postdoctoral fellow with the Center for Latin American Studies at Rutgers University.  Departing from scholarship that focuses on future-making in terms of youth mobility, her work centers on youth living in communities of extensive migration who fight for non-migratory futures. Specifically, she examines the intersection between transnational development, international migration, and indigenous youth future-making in Guatemala.  Broadly, Briana’s interests include diasporic social and political formations, affect, gender, and youth futures.  Her research has been generously supported by a NAEd/Spencer Foundation Fellowship as well as a University of California Irvine Global Studies fellowship, and her can be found in Language & Communication, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Ethnologies,  and VOLUTNAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations.  As well as the public facing Center For Migration Studies New York, Anthropology News and Youth Circulations.  

Paladia Ziss

Paladia is a PhD candidate in Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Birmingham as a CoSS Scholar. She examines how the politics of time shape social relations in refugee-hosting communities in Germany and Turkey. Paladia’s research straddles disciplines with interests in refugee and migration studies, temporality, citizenship and belonging and transnational/global-local connections. She holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BSc in Human Sciences from University College London. Before she started her PhD she worked in development and humanitarian assistance in Turkey, Palestine and Germany.