Peer Mentors

Department:
Health Policy
Fields of interest
Development of integrated mathematical and simulation models that integrate epidemiological, economic, and environmental data to evaluate air pollution mitigation policies and inform evidence-based decision-making.

Valeria Gracia Olvera (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Health Policy and a Fulbright scholar. Her research focuses on the intersection of health and the environment, generating evidence on the health and economic value of effective air pollution mitigation strategies in Mexico City to inform decision-making.

She was inspired to pursue a PhD in Health Policy after joining the Stanford-CIDE COronavirus Simulation Model (SC-COSMO) consortium, where she contributed to significant projects estimating the health effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions to control the spread of COVID-19 in Mexico.

She holds a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Engineering from the Autonomous University of San...

Department:
Anthropology
Fields of interest
Land and property afterlives; militarization; belonging; activism & social movements; Caribbean thought; colonialism; heritage

Mercedes Martínez Milantchi (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University, with a PhD minor in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her research explores the intersections of property regimes, heritage, and relationships to land, with a broader interest in how people imagine and negotiate the common good. Her dissertation, tentatively titled Who Owns the Coast? The Public Domain, Development, and Transforming Property Regimes, examines how rapid coastal development and property reform intersect with the recent remilitarization of Puerto Rico, revealing how U.S. colonial governance continues to operate through racialized logics of land, "proper"...

Department:
Theater & Performance Studies
Fields of interest
Central American Studies; Marx and Marxism; Indigeneity and Critical Latinx Indigenous Studies; Environmental Studies; Queer Theory; Decolonial Feminism; Poetry and Poetics; Avant-garde Movements in the Global South

eli melgar is a scholar-artist from Sihuatehuacán (Santa Ana, El Salvador). In Nahuatl, Sihuatehuacán means place of feminine wisdom and feminine vitality. They are a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Theater & Performance Studies. Before moving to California, they studied playwriting under the mentorship of Jorgelina Cerritos, one of Central America's most important living playwrights.

As a performance theorist, their doctoral research studies the political economy of Indigenous aesthetics in response to climate change in Abya Yala, from the colonial era to the present.

They welcome BIPOC and first-generation students to dialogue about making public what is often private...