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2016-2017 APSA Minority Fellowship Program

The following students were named as 2016-2017 APSA Minority Fellowship Program recipients during the fall 2015 application cycle. These fellows are currently enrolled in a PhD program in political science. Complete bios for each fellow appear below and were featured in the April 2016 edition of PS.

Estefania Castañeda Pérez, UCLA Estefania Castañeda Pérez
Estefania received a BA in political science with a minor in honors interdisciplinary studies at San Diego State University (SDSU). Growing up in Tijuana, Mexico, and adopting the trans-border lifestyle to attend school in San Diego, CA prompted to write an senior honors thesis investigating the different experiences and perceptions of border policing from cross-border commuters in the pedestrian lanes at the Tijuana-San Ysidro border. Her thesis won Best Student Paper Award at the Association for Borderlands Studies Conference. After graduating from SDSU, she was a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Madrid, Spain and worked to prepare high school students to compete in Model United Nations competitions. Estefania will focus her graduate studies on cross-border migration, border theory, human rights, and national security.



Alejandra Gimenez

Alejandra Gimenez, Stanford University
Alejandra graduated from the University of Brigham Young University with a BA in political science at. She had been an undergraduate research fellow with the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy at BYU since January 2014. Her research interests include American political behavior, public opinion, campaigns and elections, candidate emergence, and survey research methods. She and her co-author won first place in the 2015 Pacific Chapter of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) Student Paper Competition for their work on the effects of positive and negative cues on support for an increase in the federal minimum wage using a survey experiment that was fielded on the 2014 Utah Colleges Exit Poll. She has presented her work at MPSA, and in November 2015 she was selected to present at the University of Michigan’s Emerging Scholars Conference. She is pursuing her PhD in American Politics at Stanford.



Kenisha Gransberry

Kenisha Gransberry, Lincoln University
Kenisha graduated with a major in political science and a minor in History from Lincoln University. At Lincoln she was very active in the political science department serving as the president of the Model United Nations Club, which won several awards over the last three years. In addition to working in her major field, Kenisha served as the Student Government Association president. Given her leadership and passion for political science, she believes that her experiences will prepare her for the advancement the field. Ms. Gransberry hopes to pursue a Masters and Ph.D. in political science, and to utilize the foundation of these degrees to impact her community on the state and national level, through public service as a senator and through advocacy.



Jesse Lopez

Jesse Lopez, Duke University
Jesse graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2016 with a BA in political science. He holds an Associate’s Degree with high honors from Santa Monica Community College. Jesse has served as a research apprentice on a project involving the role of gender stereotypes in California elections, and has conducted independent research at APSA’s 2015 Ralph Bunche Summer Institute (RBSI). He was then invited to present this research, which focuses on the relationship between race, ethnicity, and retrospective voting, at the 2015 APSA Annual Meeting in San Francisco. He also spent a semester at Sciences Po in Paris, building a broader understanding of political behavior. His graduate research at Duke University focuses on the role of racial identity in people’s political perceptions and behaviors.