Wakeham Summer Research Fellowship 2026 - Fellows

Congratulations to the 2026 Wakeham Summer Research Fellows!

	Mohamed Afkir, Linguistics, Ph.D. Candidate Mohamed Afkir is a graduate PhD student in the linguistics department. My work focuses on the phonetics of Tarifit, my native language and an indigenous Amazigh (Berber) language spoken in northern Morocco. More specifically, my dissertation work focuses on investigating how people produce and perceive vowelless words, a rare crosslinguistic pattern that is emerging in Tarifit, with the goal of understanding their production and perception and what makes them so rare in languages of the world, in addition to building proper speech models that can handle under-documented languages and rare phonetic phenomena. Faculty Mentor: Georgia Zellou; department of Linguistics
	Ava-Rose Beech, Ecology, Ph.D. Candidate Ava-Rose is a Ph.D. candidate in the Graduate Group in Ecology and UC Rangelands Laboratory. Her research focuses on examining soil ecological responses to management and environmental disturbances in California's diverse rangeland landscapes. She is passionate about addressing pressing challenges in California including drought and water scarcity, wildfire, and invasive species management, to strengthen soil stability and multifunctionality in rangeland ecosystems.  Faculty Mentor: Dr. Leslie Roche, UC Rangelands Lab and UC Davis Department of Plant Science
	Sounita Mukherjee, Anthropology, Ph.D. Candidate   Sounita Mukherjee is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and a Provost Fellow. She has an MPhil in Social Sciences from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and an MA and BA in Political Science from Presidency University, Kolkata. Her publications include articles in Partition Studies Quarterly and the Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, as well as a chapter in an edited volume. Faculty Mentor: Professor James H. Smith, Anthropology
	Zoeb Jamal, Integrative Genetics and Genomics, Ph.D. Candidate Zoeb Jamal is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Integrative Genetics and Genomics program at UC Davis, where he studies the evolutionary history and putative functions of human-specific duplicated genes. Supported by the Wakeham Summer Research Fellowship, he is investigating genes involved in the immune system and retinal development alongside his advisor, Dr. Megan Dennis. Faculty Mentor: Megan Dennis, Ph.D.
	Yee Thao, Education, Ph.D. Candidate Yee Thao (she/her) is a HMoob American Ph.D. student in Education (Language, Literacy, Culture) with a designated emphasis in Environmental Humanities at UC Davis. Raised on traditional Nisenan land, she is an active political organizer, filmmaker, and educator advancing civic engagement, narrative shift, language justice, panethnic coalition building, and environmental justice.   Faculty Mentor: Dr. Ga Young Chung; Asian American Studies & Cultural Studies
	Mariana Da Silva Gabriel, Musicology, Ph.D. Candidate Mariana Da Silva Gabriel is a musicology PhD student at the UC Davis with a Designated Emphasis in Human Rights. Originally from Portugal, holds degrees from Cardiff University and the University of Oxford. Her research examines music, memory, and political resistance under authoritarian regimes, with a focus on Portugal’s Estado Novo.   Faculty Mentor: Rachana Vajjhala

Research Projects

Mohamed Afkir

Are these ASR failures language‑specific, or do they generalize systematically across understudied languages with similar phonological profiles and across different groups of speakers within these languages?

This proposed Wakeham Fellowship project will conduct a comparative, cross‑language evaluation of ASR performance across a small set of understudied languages and speaker populations. The project adopts a simple but high‑impact digital approach: we will leverage our existing speech corpora collected through my years of on-site field work in Morocco, open‑source tools, and standardized ASR systems to generate new insights without requiring acoustic model retraining. The goal is to systematically compare how ASR systems fail, and for which languages and speakers and for which types of words, when confronted with phonological structures that fall outside the typological norm encoded in most AI training data.
 

Ava-Rose Beech

Rangeland Soil Ecology and Soil Food Webs Under Managed Disturbance: Nematode Community Responses to Fire, Seeding, and Grazing

Soil ecological processes are central to the essential ecosystem services that California's rangelands provide, yet they remain poorly understood relative to aboveground dynamics. Traditional soil health metrics, such as soil carbon, often respond too slowly to inform near-term management decisions for ranchers. Our research project addresses this gap by investigating how prescribed fire, sheep grazing, and native grassland species reseeding alter soil food web composition, and how these shifts affect soil multifunctionality and plant community composition. In this work, we are examining soil samples from a long-term, experimental rangeland at UC Davis, using soil nematode communities as bioindicators of soil food web shifts. Sharing these findings with stakeholders is also central to this work, as we aim to link soil food web responses to outcomes for management. As part of this project, we will host a Soil Health Field Day near the end of the Fellowship period to share key results with ranchers and land managers. 

Sounita Mukherjee

Ecologies of Waste: Remediation, Recycling, and Residual Lifeworlds in Dhapa, Kolkata (India)

Her doctoral research focuses on Dhapa--Kolkata’s eastern waste periphery, examining the entanglements of waste ecologies, labor regimes, caste-religious assemblages, and marginal forms of urban inhabitation. Her work engages broader questions of infrastructural politics, urban transformation, migration, citizenship, and peripheral lifeworlds in postcolonial cities. Her research interests lie at the intersection of urban and political anthropology, with additional emphases on the anthropology of work, religion, visual culture, and gender. The research is expected to demonstrate that waste workers actively inhabit and negotiate these shifting conditions through everyday practices of labor, repair, care, and subaltern ritual forms. These practices are likely to reveal how waste is transformed into economic, ecological, and symbolic value through processes such as cultivation on landfill soil, wastewater-based aquaculture, and the recovery and worship of discarded deities. Early observations indicate that uncertainty is not only experienced as instability but is also rendered livable through embodied and ecological practices, a dynamic that the project seeks to examine in greater depth.
 

Zoeb Jamal

Uncovering the Role of Human-Specific Duplicated Genes in Adaptive Immunity and Retinal Development

Gene duplication, a process through which segments of DNA are erroneously copied to new locations in the genome, has been a powerful driver of evolutionary innovation across the tree of life. In the Dennis lab, we are particularly interested in duplicated genes created uniquely on the human lineage, arising in the past ~6.5 million years since the human-chimpanzee divergence. This project investigates human-specific duplicated (HSD) genes, aiming to understand their evolutionary history and determine their contributions to human-specific traits, through two complementary aims. The first uses long-read sequencing data to detect signatures of balancing selection at CD8B, an HSD gene family involved in adaptive immunity. The second uses single-cell transcriptomics and co-expression network analysis to characterize the functional role of FRMPD2, an HSD gene family implicated in retinal development. Together, these aims advance our understanding of how gene duplication has shaped the evolution of our species and continues to influence human biology.
 

Yee Thao

Cultivating Literacy: HMoob Agricultural Knowledge as Critical Pedagogy

HMoob Agricultural Knowledge as Critical Pedagogy” examines how Hmong agricultural practices function as everyday sites of literacy and knowledge production. Particularly, this research interrogates geopolitical and legal conceptions of indigeneity, land, diaspora, and non-bordered identities by examining how Hmong communities sustain knowledge, identity, and intergenerational learning through agricultural practice rather than formal written systems or nation-state citizenship. By theorizing agriculture as a form of critical literacy, the project expands literacy pedagogy while contributing to scholarship in education, environmental humanities, refugee epistemologies, and HMoob studies.
 

Mariana Da Silva Gabriel

Rehearing Resistance: Political Listening and Musical Meaning Under Portugal’s Estado Novo. 

My project recovers how people, under the chilling reality of the Portuguese Estado Novo dictatorship (1933-1974) constructed, received, and decoded political meaning from Portuguese popular music. I rethink political listening as manner of listening against the grain of censorship, through oral history testimonies and playback ethnography with survivors of the regime. I also develop rehearing as process of bringing together these memories with archival documents and close musical and gestural analysis of the songs that escaped censorship. Rehearing here means both to listen again musically and to revisit as one would a legal case akin to truth commissions in post-dictatorships. Grounded in musicology, memory studies, and human rights frameworks, my project treats this recovery as reparative and resisting the censorship and official histories of the Estado Novo. I propose that political listening and rehearing can be extended to other periods of societal repression.