Berkeley Social Sciences announces new chairs and directors

September 11, 2023

Kenny Ma

Berkeley Social Sciences recently announced the appointments of 11 new department chairs and directors. They include:

	Sabrina Agarwal, the new chair of the Department of Anthropology. Professor Agarwal’s research interests include bioarchaeology, biological and evolutionary anthropology, skeletal biology and osteoporosis, health and disease, inequality and structural violence, aging and disability, paleopathology and bioethics. She also currently serves as Special Advisor to the Chancellor and member of the UC Berkeley NAGPRA Advisory Committee.
	Leo Arriola, the new associate dean of the Berkeley SHARE region, which provides the human resources, research administration, purchasing and reimbursement and payroll and timekeeping services that departments require. He is also an associate dean of Social Sciences. As a political scientist, Professor Arriola’s research interests include the challenges associated with representation and governance in multiethnic societies, as well as inter-ethnic political cooperation, political violence in divided societies and strategies of human rights advocacy.
	Ozlem Ayduk, the new chair of the Department of Psychology. Professor Ayduk’s research interests include the role of negative interpersonal schemas as a social-cognitive mediator of personal and interpersonal adjustment; the role of self-distancing in enabling emotional regulation; and the examination the precursors, correlates and the consequences of children’s ability to delay gratification.
	Sai Balakrishnan, the new co-chair of the Global Metropolitan Studies. Professor Balakrishnan’s research and teaching broadly pivot around global urban inequalities and specifically on the agrarian genealogies of urban inequalities in South Asia. She is also chair of the undergraduate major and urban studies at the College of Environmental Design.
	Anna Livia Brand, the new interim co-chair of the Global Metropolitan Studies. Professor Brand’s research and teaching focus on racial landscapes and on the geographical implications of racial justice. She examines how race is produced in the urban landscape through everyday planning and design imaginaries and decisions that produce and maintain racialized exclusion and privilege. Her work also engages with the reparative and abolitionist possibilities of racial landscapes.
	Sharad Chari, the new co-director of the Program in Critical Theory, which enables graduate students already enrolled in UC Berkeley Ph.D. programs from across the social sciences, arts and humanities to obtain certification of a Designated-Emphasis specialization in Critical Theory. Professor Chari’s research has been on an agrarian history of an industrial town in South India, the remains of segregation/ apartheid and opposition in South Africa, the politics of the ‘ocean economy’ in the Southern African Indian Ocean, and he is currently completing a book that bends Black queer biography into a critique of sexuality in the new/ old South Africa.
	Dennis Feehan, the new director of the Social Sciences D-Lab, which helps Berkeley graduate students, faculty and staff move forward with world-class research in data intensive social sciences and humanities. Feehan will play an important role in expanding Berkeley's cross-disciplinary research infrastructure and capabilities at the D-Lab. Professor Feehan is a demographer whose research interests include the intersection of social networks, demography and quantitative methodology.
	Marion Fourcade, the re-appointed director of Social Science Matrix, which supports interdisciplinary research and intellectual exchange in the social science division. Professor Fourcade is a sociologist who specializes in the comparative history and sociology of the social sciences and in the study of new forms of stratification, morality and profit in the digital economy.
	Dave Harding, the new chair of the Department of Sociology. Professor Harding’s research interests include poverty and inequality, urban neighborhoods, education, adolescents and young adults, incarceration and prisoner reentry.
	Heather Haveman, the new director of the Masters of Computational Social Sciences program. Professor Haveman’s research interests include studying organizations, the people within them and the fields within which they operate. Her current work involves American tech firms, the field of academic journal publishing and American women's intercollegiate sports teams.
	Kenny Ma, the new Social Sciences director of communications. Ma began his career as journalist at publications such as the Los Angeles Times and Orlando Sentinel, but spent most of his career in higher education, working in communications at public and private institutions, including the University of Texas System and Portland State University. He leads Social Sciences communications in digital/web, editorial/media and social media.

“I know that this group of leaders will foster an environment that encourages intellectual curiosity and critical thinking,” said Raka Ray, dean of Berkeley Social Sciences. “We look forward to working with them to advance our educational and research mission.”