Center Team

Heather Bullock, CEJA director, PI and research & evaluation co-director, UC Essential Needs Research, Training, and Promising Practices Consortium

Heather Bullock brings to UCSC’s Center for Economic Justice and Action more than twenty-five years of experience working with nonprofit organizations on poverty alleviation initiatives and community-engaged scholarship. Heather’s research examines women’s pathways in and out of poverty and homelessness, women’s experiences with public assistance programs, and how classism, racism, and sexism influence policy attitudes and the treatment of low-income women and their families.  

Heather served as the inaugural chair of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Committee on Socioeconomic Status and was a member of APA’s Deep Poverty Initiative Working Group. She received a 2019 American Psychological Association Presidential Citation in recognition of her contributions to the field. In addition to publishing numerous articles, book chapters, and reports, she is author of Women and Poverty: Psychology, Public Policy, and Social Justice and co-author of Psychology and Economic Injustice: Personal, Professional, and Political Intersections (with Bernice Lott), Rugged Individualism and the Misunderstanding of American Inequality (with Lawrence Eppard and Mark Rank), and Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong about Poverty (with Mark Rank and Lawrence Eppard).

Heather was an APA/AAAS Congressional Fellow with the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions – Democratic Office, working for Senator Edward M. Kennedy on policies related to poverty, food insecurity, and early childhood education. She is currently President Elect of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. 

Eva Bertram, CEJA associate director,
associate professor, Politics Department

Eva Bertram is an Associate Professor in the Politics Department and Associate Director of the Center for Economic Justice and Action at UCSC. She studies American politics, public policy, political history, and political economy. Her areas of research focus include economic inequality, poverty, social policy, and labor market policy and politics. Her current research project examines the political and social origins and impacts of contingent work in the United States.  

Her published works include two books, The Workfare State: Public Assistance Politics from the New Deal to the New Democrats (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) and Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial (University of California Press, 1996), as well as articles in Politics and Society, Political Science Quarterly, and Studies in American Political Development. 

She serves on the Board of Directors of the Community Action Board for Santa Cruz County, the Executive Board of the UCSC Institute for Social Transformation, and the Faculty Advisory Board of the UCSC Center for Labor and Community.  

Before joining the UCSC faculty, she worked for more than ten years in Washington, D.C. with social justice and human rights organizations and for a congressional committee. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University, and her B.A. from Swarthmore College.

Lisa Nishioka, CEJA program manager

Lisa Nishioka oversees the day-to-day operations and provides support for the programs and projects at CEJA. She brings with her 25 years of research administration experience and is also a UCSC alumna.

At the moment for her, the most exciting part of the research is seeing the impact it has on the student research assistants, disseminating the findings, and helping advance progress locally and globally. Playing a role in making that all happen is an amazing privilege.

Gwen Chodur, NIH/CEJA postdoctoral scholar

Gwen Chodur is a postdoctoral scholar working on the FRESH (Food, Rest, Exercise, and Student Health) study. Her research focus is in understanding the mechanisms linking social exposures such as food insecurity and stress to chronic disease development and more importantly, how to effectively interrupt increased chronic disease risk trajectories.

Gwen is a first-generation college student who completed a PhD in Nutritional Biology at UC Davis. At UC Davis, Gwen co-founded the graduate student food pantry and was part of a team that developed the vision for UC Davis’s Aggie Compass, a student services center to support food, housing, mental wellness, and other basic needs insecurities among university students.  She also holds a MSPH from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and earned a BS from the Pennsylvania State University, where she was a Pell Grant recipient.

Lucía Alvarado Cantero,
CEJA graduate student researcher

Lucía Alvarado Cantero is a doctoral candidate in the Education department with a designated emphasis in Social Documentation at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She holds  a masters in Spanish linguistics with a focus on multimodal discourse analysis and a masters in Language Acquisition, both from the University of Costa Rica, her home country.

Her studies at the doctoral level explore the formal and informal learning experiences of forcibly displaced children from Central America and Mexico during their migration journey to the U.S. She is an interdisciplinary scholar that integrates anthropology, education, discourse analysis, and art in her research and teaching.

At the Center for Economic Justice and Action, she works as a Graduate Student Researcher leading a longitudinal project that explores the impacts of a guaranteed income and financial capability training program focusing on Latina mothers and survivors of domestic violence.

Sonali Singh, essential needs research & evaluation analyst, UC Essential Needs Research, Training, and Promising Practices Consortium

Sonali Singh is a Project Policy Analyst at UC San Francisco, where she supports various research and evaluation projects addressing student basic needs insecurity in higher education. Her research interests broadly include food insecurity, food environments, and diet-related health outcomes.

Sonali received her MPH from UC Berkeley, with a focus on Public Health Nutrition and a certificate in Food Systems, and earned her BS in Environmental Science & Policy from the University of Maryland.

Ruben Canedo, essential needs training and education co-director, UC Essential Needs Research, Training, and Promising Practices Consortium

Ruben E. Canedo (he/they), born & raised in the border areas of Coachella, Imperial, and Mexicali. Ruben’s career focuses on public higher education and transformative justice. Ruben serves as Director of Strategic Equity Initiatives within UC Berkeley’s Division of Equity & Inclusion. His responsibilities include research, organizing, policy, and advocacy. Additionally, he was appointed to the dual roles of Chair of the UC Berkeley Basic Needs Committee (2012-2023) and Co-Chair of the UC Systemwide Basic Needs Committee (2013-2023).

As of Summer 2023, Ruben is one of four co-founders who are launching the new Center for Economic Justice & Action (CEJA) that will be dedicated to research, evaluation, education, and training for public higher education and related movement locations. Ruben will serve as CEJA’s Co-Director of Education & Training.

Outside of his roles in higher education, for over 15 years, Ruben supports small to large institutions/organizations/community-based organizations/sports dedicated to healing, disability, and transformative justice with facilitation, strategy, training, and keynoting. Fun fact: Ruben grew up in traditional Okinawan Karate, he began at age 4 and currently holds a 3rd-degree black belt.

Tim Galarneau, essential needs training and education co-director, UC Essential Needs Research, Training, and Promising Practices Consortium

Tim Galarneau (he/they) serves as a  co-director of Education and Training with the newly renamed Center for Economic Justice and Action (CEJA) at UC Santa Cruz, formerly known as the Blum Center on Poverty, Social Enterprise, and Participatory Governance. Tim’s work will advance systemwide basic needs efforts across campuses, intersegmental engagement, and nationally. Tim also works with students, producers, chefs, and supply chains across California and beyond to advance regional, seasonal, and small to mid scale under invested producer and enterprise relationships across the food system.

At the UC Santa Cruz Center for Agroecology he oversees a team of staff and students working from the field to the plate in re-envisioning access to delicious and nourishing food for all. In addition, he is a co-founder of Real Food Challenge and a board advisor to the national movement non-profit, Real Food Generation, advancing a student driven higher education effort to address equity and justice across the food system. 

Tim lives on the north shore of the Monterey Bay with his family and enjoys open ocean swimming year round, diving into great books as well as hosting mythic storytelling gatherings, drawing from tales spun around the world.

Suzanna Martinez, research co-lead, UC Essential Needs Research, Training, and Promising Practices Consortium

Dr. Martinez is an Associate Professor at the University of California, San Francisco in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. As a Latina and first-generation to attend college, her overarching goal is to make an impact on reducing health disparities among populations made vulnerable by systems of oppression. Her research centers on food insecurity and its impact across the lifespan.

Dr. Martinez is an Associate Professor at the University of California, San Francisco in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. As a Latina and first-generation to attend college, her overarching goal is to make an impact on reducing health disparities among populations made vulnerable by systems of oppression. Her research centers on food insecurity and its impact across the lifespan.

Sophia Orsinelli,
CEJA graduate student researcher

Sophia Orsinelli is a PhD student in the Social Psychology department at UC Santa Cruz. She holds a BS in Neuroscience & Behavior from the University of Notre Dame, where she also majored in Italian Studies.

Her research interests include how food insecurity and other economic injustice issues affect vulnerable populations, such as women, students, farmworkers, and the unhoused. At CEJA, Sophia works as a graduate student researcher mentoring undergraduate students in the Economic Justice and Community Corps, an initiative that aims to build capacity in local anti-poverty nonprofits.

Nayan Bhatia,
CEJA graduate student researcher

Nayan Bhatia is a PhD student at UC Santa Cruz. He works to develop technological solutions that make a real difference in students’ lives across the UC system. His most significant contribution has been the development of the UC Essential Needs Navigator, a GPT-powered chatbot. The UC Essential Needs Navigator develops consolidated resources for housing assistance, food security programs, academic support services, financial aid, and emergency support services.

His work aligns with CEJA’s commitment to “fixing systems, not people”, using technology to make essential resources more accessible and user-friendly for all UC students. Through this role, he has helped streamline the way students connect with vital support services, making it easier for them to find and access the resources they need to succeed in their academic journey.