Awards & Accomplishments

Here are the awards, accomplishments, and funding our current graduate students have received. 

Awards/Accomplishments

• Hannah Andrews was awarded the Spring 2021 SBS Outstanding Graduate Teaching Associate Award. This award acknowledges the teaching contributions of our under-recognized GTAs and serves to inform the larger community about GTAs’ invaluable contributions to the School of Sociology’s instructional mission.
• Kelsey Gonzalez was selected to participate in the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS) at Duke University in June 2020. She then served as a TA for the Tucson Winter SICSS site in January 2021.
• Kelsey Gonzalez spent the summer, 2021 at IBM, interning as a Senior Data Scientist in their Chief Analytics Office.
• PhD. Candidate Sione Lister Selected for RWJF Health Policy Research Scholars.
• PhD. Candidate Kelsey Gonzalez Wins First Place in 2020 Data Visualization Challenge.
• Youngjun (Josh) Zhang and PhD. Candidate Alexander Kinney Winners of Bowers Award May, 2020.

Funding

• Mariana Manriquez received the prestigious Louise Foucar Marshall Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. This fellowship recognizes Mariana's exceptional dissertation work, including her innovative topic, rigorous methodology, and potential contributions to the field. This honor is made possible through the generous support of the Marshall Foundation, which has a long-standing tradition of empowering students and fostering educational excellence. 2025
• Amanda Pierson received the SBS JEDI Award. Understanding How Individuals Experience Homelessness and Access Services in Tucson. 2024
• Cat Burgess received a SBSRI Dissertation Research Grant. Cat's research investigates how people recover from substance use disorders without attending formal rehabilitation programs or 12-step groups—a process known as natural recovery. Nearly 50% of people who recover from substance use disorders do so without formal assistance, but these recovery pathways are critically understudied. In interviews with adults in natural recovery in AZ, she aims to explore how and why people achieve natural recovery. 2024
• Victoria Sisk received a SBSRI Dissertation Research Grant. Victoria's research investigates an innovative model for addressing the affordable housing crisis, gentrification, and displacement: Community Land Trusts. CLTs are nonprofits that create long-term affordable housing by removing land and buildings from the speculative market. Victoria draws on in-depth interviews with CLT workers and analysis of legal documents to examine how CLTs fit into, or challenge, racial capitalism and the delegated welfare state. 2024
• Tara Prendergast received a SBSRI Dissertation Research Grant. Tara's research examines how full-time workers living in or near poverty make sense of political-economic changes in labor in general, and raises to the minimum wage in particular. Drawing on in-depth interviews with workers in the LA and Phoenix MSA’s, she examines how social context and more individuated factors influence how workers think about themselves, others, and the U.S. system of stratification more broadly. The findings have implications for understanding how wage-centered policies can contribute to, or exacerbate, American inequality. 2023
• Jun-Jie Lin received an SBSRI Pre-Doctoral Research Grant. His project explores the cultural and social motivations of Taiwanese motorcycle club members for their intentional traffic violation behaviors. 2023
• Peter Ore received the SBS Summer Dissertation Fellowship. Peter will spend the summer doing archival research, curating novel bibliographic and biographic datasets, and writing up his findings. His dissertation is on the politics of air pollution control in the United States from 1910 to 1980. Ronald Breiger is chairing his dissertation, with committee members Brian Mayer, Christina Diaz (Rice), and Jeremy Vetter. 2022
• Jina Lee received the SBS Summer Dissertation Fellowship. This will provide substantial financial support for her to continue her dissertation research this summer, including visits to archives. 2022
• Rina James received the SBS Summer Dissertation Fellowship. This will provide substantial financial support for her to continue her dissertation research this summer, including visits to archives. 2022
• Zhoufan Li received the SBS Summer Dissertation Fellowship. Zhuofan will spend the summer doing research including the collection and analysis of data on career trajectories of researchers working in the field of computer vision. 2022
• Sam Scovill received an SBSRI research grant to fund research for their dissertation, titled "Defining Politics and Political Identity: Young People's Social Positionality and Political Imaginations."
• Eunsung Yoon received research and travel funds from UA’s GPSC as well as the ASA.
• Kelsey Gonzalez and co-PI Nicolas Legewie (UPenn & Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) received a Russell Sage Foundation SICSS Research Grant for $7,193 for research on network activation.
• Two graduate students working with Joe Galaskiewicz (PI) received Doctoral Dissertation Research Grants from the National Science Foundation. Beksahn Jang is studying the Political Incorporation of Asian Americans, and Alexander Kinney is studying Relational Pragmatics and Institution Work in Transitioning Industry.
• PhD Candidate Peter Ore Wins The Mellon Graduate Fellowship.
• Ph.D. Candidate Alex Kinney Awarded SBS Summer Dissertation Fellowship.