Assistant professor's project examines immigrant and deportee experiences
Carolina Valdivia has joined an elite group of UC Irvine junior faculty members whose research will be supported financially for the 2025-26 school year through a 22-year-old fellowship.
The assistant professor of criminology, law & society and seven of her colleagues across campus were recently named UC Irvine Society of Hellman Fellows.
“UC Irvine is excited to share the 2025-26 class of Hellman Fellows,” said Gillian Hayes, vice provost for academic personnel, when the new fellows were revealed. “These eight, outstanding assistant-rank faculty are engaged in research that pushes boundaries across a wide range of fields and are tackling big questions with real-world impact. We’re deeply thankful to the Hellman Fellows Endowed Fund for supporting their bold ideas and helping launch the next generation of academic leaders.”
“I am very honored to have been selected as a Hellman Fellow and hope to use this as an opportunity to shed light on the experiences of this growing segment of the immigrant and deportee population, particularly at a time marked by heightened enforcement and growing anti-immigrant sentiment,” Valdivia said.
The proposal the assistant professor submitted to the selection panel is titled “Family Reunification in the U.S. Post-Deportation.”
“This project focuses on the lives of individuals who have returned to the U.S. post-deportation and their family members,” Valdivia explains. “Given the significant barriers associated with legal re-entries, families must often reunite in the U.S. without authorization. Consequently, they carry out lives under a double risk: of incarceration and deportation.”
The Hellman Fellows Fund began in 1995 at UC Berkeley and UC San Diego and has since expanded organically to all UC universities – including UC Irvine, where 95 junior faculty members have been selected since 2013. Since the program first began, more than 2,000 people from public and private institutions have been Hellman Fellowship recipients.
In 2020, after 25 years of funding the fellowships, the Hellman family created an endowment to allow the awards to continue in perpetuity across UC’s 10 campuses.
The grants may be used for such research purposes as equipment, travel, photography and graduate assistants. “The aim of the program is to support promising assistant professors who show the capacity for great distinction in their research,” reads a UC Irvine release. “Funds awarded are intended as a one-time subsidy for activities that will enhance the individual’s progress toward tenure.”
Besides Valdivia, 2025-26 awardees at UC Irvine are:
- Coleman Collins, assistant professor of art, for a proposal titled “Passagenwerken”
- Henri Drake, assistant professor of Earth system science, for a proposal titled “Principled Conceptual Modeling of Global Ocean-Ice Interactions”
- Paola Guerrero Rosada, assistant professor of education, for a proposal titled “Designing and Implementing a Quality Improvement Intervention for Science, Math, and Literacy in Puerto Rico”
- Evgeny Kvon, assistant professor of developmental & cell biology, for a proposal titled “Genetic Basis of Chondrodysplasia in Domestic Dogs”
- Evangelina Macias, assistant professor of dance, for a proposal titled “Moving in from the Periphery: Locating Native American Women in Fancy Dance History”
- Pim Oomen, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, for a proposal titled “The Impact of Sex Hormones on the Heart: Mechanistic and Therapeutic Insights”
- Xizheng Wang, assistant professor of mechanical & aerospace engineering, for a proposal titled “Accelerated Discovery and Electrified Manufacturing of High Entropy Alloys”
— Matt Coker
Photo credit: Han Parker/UCI