People

• Abbey Alkon R.N., Ph.D

  UC San Francisco

  (415) 476-4695

   

  Abbey Alkon is a nurse epidemiologist with experience as a pediatric nurse practitioner and researcher of community-based studies of young children. She studies young children’s exposure to stress and how it affects their physical and mental health, along with health and safety in child care settings. She is the director of the California Childcare Health Program, an organization which provides services, training, and research on health and safety in child care. She has published several articles on the relationship between children’s family stress, child care environments, and injuries in child care centers.

  
  

• Jose Arias, M.A.

  UC Berkeley, Institute for the Study of Social Change

  (510) 642-0813

   

  Jose Arias is a Ph.D. student in the Social and Cultural Studies program of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. He holds a B.A. in Latin American Studies from UC Berkeley and a masters in Social Sciences in Education from Stanford University. Deeply committed to issues of social justice that affect youth of color, in particular those that surround micro/macro level disciplinary practices of the state, Jose has worked with numerous campus and nonprofit organizations – including Homies Unidos of El Salvador and San Mateo County Barrios Unidos – that assist youth in both navigating and challenging classed, gendered, and racialized contexts of oppression. He currently serves as a consultant for a PBS funded documentary on school discipline. Jose’s dissertation focuses on the ways in which youth use historically (in)formed semiotic and physical resources, within and without schools, to (re)create, resist, and discipline themselves and others into and against academic identities. 

  
  

• Isami Arifuku, D.Crim.

  National Council on Crime and Delinquency

  (510) 208-0500, ext. 333

   

  Isami Arifuku is director of the Center’s administrative core and is coordinator of research for the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. She worked previously on the Asian & Pacific Islander Youth Violence Prevention Center, a precursor of the current Academic Center of Excellence.

  
  

• Patricia Baquedano-Lopez, Ph.D.

  UC Berkeley, Graduate School of Education

   

  Dr. Baquedano-Lopez is an associate professor of education at UC Berkeley. Her interests include the study of language socialization, classroom discourse, learning, and literacy practices in schools, after-school programs, and home and work communities. She is a co-investigator on the Center’s research project “Youth Experiences of Neighborhood Change.”