sociologist, migration scholar
Bio
I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago in the Comparative Human Development Department. I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California Los Angeles in 2020 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell from 2020 to 2022.
I study international migration, and I am especially interested in the experiences of immigrant children and asylum-seekers, in how immigration policies shape migrants’ lives, in how immigrants impact local communities and prompt responses from locals ranging from solidarity to conflict, and in the role of non-profits, legal advocates, and volunteers play in helping the state to manage migration. I'm an expert on Latin American migration to the US, and I have also worked on EU migration policy and issues in the past, a region that I'm still very interested in and follow closely. My research has been supported by several funding agencies, including the National Science Foundation, and has been published in various academic journals, as well as in the form of book chapters, policy reports, and op-eds.
I am the author of the book, Precarious Protections: Unaccompanied Minors Seeking Asylum in the United States (University of California Press. 2023), an ethnographic study that chronicles the experiences and perspectives of Central American unaccompanied minors and their immigration attorneys as they pursue applications for refugee status in the US asylum process.
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My current research includes two major studies. First, with funding from the American Bar Foundation and in collaboration with Tatiana Padilla (Boston University), we are studying access to legal representation and determinants of case outcomes for unaccompanied minors in the U.S. immigration court using a large administrative dataset. Second, with funding from the Russell Sage Foundation and with a team of research assistants, I am conducting an ethnographic study on the reception of Venezuelan asylum-seekers who were bussed from Texas to Chicago.
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Before pursuing an academic career, I worked for non-profits and was a researcher for the Italian National Contact Point of the European Migration Network.