Michaela Simmons is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She attended UC San Diego for her undergraduate studies where she earned a BA in sociology and fine arts. She is a recipient of the Ford Foundation Predoctoral and Doctoral Fellowship, as well as the National Science Foundation Fellowship. Her research interests broadly focus on poverty, the welfare state, and racial inequality. Her dissertation examines the racial politics of the foster care system in the early 20 th century and centers the experiences of foster youth within the larger sociological frameworks of family, race, and childhood.
