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News and Events

First year PhD student Laila Waddell wins prestigious Eugene Cota-Robles fellowship

October 02, 2025

We are thrilled to share that incoming PhD student Laila Waddell, who earned her BA from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in December 2024, has won the prestigious Eugene Cota-Robles Fellowship. The Cota-Robles is named after one of the first Mexican-American professors in the UC system and provides full tuition and fees plus a living stipend for the first two years of a PhD. Laila plans to continue to research the intersection of environmental justice and urban planning in disenfranchised communities during her PhD in political science.

Alex Cohen Accepts Postdoctoral Scholar Position at UC Berkeley’s Democracy Policy Lab

September 16, 2025

Alex Cohen, a graduate student in our PhD program, has accepted a postdoctoral position as a voting law scholar with the Democracy Policy Lab at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy (GSPP). In this full-time, mentored research appointment, Alex will contribute to the nationally recognized Voting Laws Roundup—a partnership between Berkeley’s GSPP and the Brennan Center for Justice that tracks state-level legislation affecting the right to vote.

PhD Candidate Haley Daarstad awarded APSA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant

September 16, 2025

Haley Daarstad was awarded $15,000 through the APSA doctoral dissertation research improvement grant (DDRIG) to support her research on criminal violence during elections in Mexico. Her dissertation explores how women and men experience and impact criminal violence differently at various stages of the electoral process in Mexico.

Recent PhD Marika Miner publishes on internet shutdowns in India in the Journal of Peace Research

September 16, 2025

Since 2016, governments in 77 countries have imposed more than 1,100 internet shutdowns, a tactic increasingly used under the banner of “digital repression.” A new Journal of Peach Research study by recent UC Davis PhD graduate Marika Miner focusing on India—the global leader in shutdowns—finds that these blackouts are not applied evenly in response to security threats, as officials often claim. Instead, they disproportionately target regions with lower ruling party support, follow incidents of opposition violence, and precede spikes in military action.

Recent PhD Jonathan Colner publishes on computer vision in Political Analysis

September 16, 2025

A new study in Political Analysis by recent PhD graduate Jonathan Colner, now an assistant professor at American University, introduces a practical workflow for using free large language and object detection models to extract structured political data from poorly formatted sources. While political scientists often rely on optical character recognition, regular expressions, or labor-intensive hand-coding, the method described in the article streamlines the process—requiring only a small number of hand-labeled examples to train effectively.