2021-2022 Participants

Mia Rae Albano

Mia Rae Albano is a third-year transfer student majoring in human geography. Her love for geography began at Ohlone College while taking World Regional Geography with Dr. Adam Levy who inspired her to pursue geography in higher education. Her scholarly interests include feminist theory, gender and women’s studies, development studies, and political economy.

Jessica Allen

Jessica Allen is a queer, black-latinx, single mother, doula, and visionary with a relentless determination to ignite black families towards large-scale revolution and intergenerational healing. As a first-generation college student, she is studying Human Geography and African-American studies at UC Berkeley; with a commitment to researching black genealogies, the science of epigenetics, and the racialization of poverty and location. Jessica Allen’s leadership has been immense in the UC Berkeley community and the local Bay Area. Currently, she is an executive board member of nonprofit (SFWAR) San Francisco Women Against Rape and a Peter E. Haas Service Leader, which includes her community service project of leading pregnancy and parenting support groups to local Bay Area communities. Through offering community love and care in her doula work, she has proudly supported over one-hundred births in her community and addressed chronic stress, social isolation, and emotional hardship within her practice. She has been in service to San Francisco Bay Area’s most disenfranchised populations (LGBTQ youth, formerly incarcerated people, and women’s reproductive health) for over a decade.

Angela McMahon

Cory Sugano

Cory Sugano is a third year environmental economics & policy and geography double major studying economy, culture, & society. His interests focus on the intersection between policy, the environment, economics, and landscape planning. After teaching and working on projects under UC Berkeley’s Norman Miller and Nathan Sayre in the geography department, Cory is seeking to expand his experience in both academia and the public sector in order to develop further their pursuits in the realm of geography.

Emma Wolfgram

Emma Wolfgram is a queer, nontraditional, sixth-year transfer student. Specializing in cultural geography, some of their interests include Black feminist geographic theory, Queer political economies, Cultural reproduction of sex and power, Geographies of sexuality, Spatial relationships of African Diasporic Dance, Urbanism and Metropolitian studies, Indigenous and decolonial feminist ways of knowing, Land Stewardship, Library Information Science, and Archive Activism. They are currently an intern for the Community Mapping Studio; a collaborative cartography space where students from all backgrounds are welcomed to connect with community organizations in need of maps. They are collaborating with West African dance instructor, Latanya D. Tigner to facilitate and produce Dance maps reflecting the generational retention of information stored in the body across the African Diaspora.

Jane Henderson

Jane Henderson is a PhD candidate in the department of Geography. Her research focuses on Black geographies in relationship to settler colonialism in her hometown Minneapolis, Minnesota. Jane is a founding member of the Berkeley Black Geographies Project. As an undergraduate she participated in multiple research mentorship programs and credits her success in applying to graduate school to the support of mentors at the Michigan State Summer Research Opportunities Program (SROP) and the University of San Diego TRiO McNair Scholars Program.

april l. graham-jackson

april l. graham-jackson is a third generation Black chicagoan, former music journalist, and third year ph.d. student. her research thinks through geomusicologies and geosonicologies to examine Black scale—a cross-sensory encounter between Blackness, music, sound, and locationality—to illustrate how urban to suburban migration reshaped Black identity, music, and sounds into multiscalar territories of belonging and strangeness. april graduated phi beta kappa and summa cum laude with a degree in Black geographies from mount holyoke college. she mentors several undergraduates through a holistic approach that draws from the earthy witticisms of her late grandparents and experiences as a homegirl and first generation, “non-traditional” age student.

Morgan Vickers

Morgan P. Vickers is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography. Their current work focuses on the drowned towns of the Santee-Cooper Project in Lowland South Carolina, wherein 901 families were displaced and native swampland ecologies were destroyed in the name of New Deal “progress.” Thematically, Morgan’s work contemplates Black ecologies, Black geographies, placemaking, federal dam and reservoir projects, affect, community memory studies, and questions of belonging. As an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Morgan participated in several mentorship programs, including the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) and the Community Histories Workshop Undergraduate Research Assistantship Program.

Sam Stein

Sam Stein is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography. His research examines complex fluvial systems across different spatial and temporal scales with an explicit goal of improving natural resource management. Prior to entering his doctoral program, Sam had a number of illuminating experiences as both a mentee and a mentor while working at San Francisco State University as a lecturer, academic counselor, and director of the Campus Academic Resource Program (CARP).

Leonora Zoninsein