Peer Mentors
J. Rubén Díaz Vásquez is an interdisciplinary scholar of race, immigration, coloniality, performance, and literature in Chicanx and Mexican culture, with a specialization in Indigeneity. He is currently a PhD Candidate in the Modern Thought & Literature Program at Stanford. His current dissertation studies the ubiquitous representations of Indigeneity—Indigenous history, aesthetics, and identity—in late 20th century poetry and cultural performances by Mexican-origin people on both sides of the border. His dissertation is tentatively titled, “Between Tenochtitlan and CalifAztlan: Making Mexicanidad and the Poetics of Indigeneity, Performance, and Culture.” It juxtaposes analyzes of Chicanx and Mexican poetry with ethnographic observation of...
Valeria Gracia Olvera (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in Health Policy and a Fulbright scholar. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Advancing Health Policy: Environmental and Preventive Health Strategies in Mexico,” aims to support decision-making and concentrates on two main objectives. The first is to assess the health and economic impacts of air pollution mitigation strategies in Mexico City. The second is to identify the most effective cervical cancer screening strategies for the human papillomavirus (HPV)-vaccinated population in Mexico.
She was inspired to pursue a PhD in Health Policy after joining the Stanford-CIDE COronavirus Simulation Model (SC-COSMO) (https://www.sc-cosmo.org/) consortium, where she contributed...
Christian Robles-Baez is a PhD Candidate in History at Stanford University, where he is studying the transformation of coffee from a luxury item to a staple commodity in the early nineteenth century. His research centers on Brazilian coffee production and its consumption in the United States. His doctoral dissertation, tentatively titled “The Making of an Improbable Global Market: Coffee (1808-1850)”, explores how coffee emerged as one of the world’s most valuable commodity markets despite the pervasive risks and adversities of its early years. Robles-Baez’s interdisciplinary research aims at bridging fields such as Business History, History of Capitalism, Environmental History, Transnational...