Institute for Regional and International Studies
Biography Juliana Brandão is a 10-year experienced Brazilian lawyer and a first-year Ph.D. student in the Environment and Resources program at The Nelson Institute. Her primary areas of expertise are in labor and public law in Brazil. She has a master’s in International Commercial Law from the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. Currently, Juliana is …
Biography Kurt Kuehne is a Sociology PhD student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He holds an M.A. in Southeast Asian Studies (UW–Madison) and an A.B. in Politics (Princeton). Before starting his graduate studies, Kurt was a Princeton in Asia Fellow at the Singapore Ministry of Education. He later worked for MetaMetrics, an education research and …
Biography Tyler A. Lehrer is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History with a minor emphasis in gender and women’s studies. He holds an M.A. in religious studies from the University of Colorado Boulder. Tyler’s research engages the history of religious and diplomatic exchange in the early modern Indian ocean, specifically intersections between Buddhist …
Olayinka Olagbegi-Adegbite is a PhD candidate in the Department of Educational Policy Studies with a concentration in Comparative and International Education, and a minor in Curriculum and Instruction. She is a Nigerian whose academic sojourn in the United Stated started in 2007 when she was selected as one of the Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistants …
Biography Hugh Roland is a PhD student in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. He is a sociology minor and an affiliate of the Center for Demography and Ecology and the Center for Culture, History, and the Environment. His research interests focus on climate change related human migration, health disparities, and issues of power and …
Biography Angela Serrano is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at UW–Madison. Her research draws on agrarian studies and political ecology to understand how consumption and finance shape the livelihood possibilities of farmers and farmworkers. She currently studies oil palm crops, looking at how the involvement of financial investors in these crops is changing crop management …
Biography Adalbert Gerald Soosai Raj is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Sciences and Education at University of Wisconsin–Madison. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Sciences from UW–Madison and a Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology from College of Engineering Guindy (CEG) in Chennai, India. Gerald’s research primarily focuses on teaching Computer Science (CS) to students …
Biography Irène Tombo is a first year Ph.D. student in Comparative Politics. She was born and raised in Goma, DRC. She recently graduated from Johns Hopkins University-SAIS with an MA (2017) in International Economics with concentrations in African Studies and International Political Economy. Prior to attending SAIS, she attended the University of the Incarnate Word …
Biography Pearly Wong is a first-year PhD student in the joint program of Cultural Anthropology and Environmental and Resources with the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. She has six years of working experience in the field of International Development in Nepal, Cameroon, Sri Lanka and Indonesia prior to Madison. Her research project focuses on understanding …