Student Experience and Success

Richard J. Edelstein

Senior Research Associate

Richard J. Edelstein is a Senior Research Associate at Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education where he collaborates with John Douglass, Senior Research Fellow, on studies of the impact of globalization on higher education institutions. He is also Principal and Managing Director at Global University Concepts, a higher education consultancy he launched to advise universities on international strategies and the development of partnerships and alliances with foreign institutions. He was Director of International Affairs for six years at AACSB International, the primary U.S....

Krista M. Soria

Institutional Research, Assessment, and Policy Analysis and Office for Student Affairs, University of Idaho

Dr. Krista M. Soria (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Leadership and Counseling at the University of Idaho. She is a critical quantitative researcher seeking to investigate the most equitable and inclusive programmatic practices and institutional conditions to prepare students to engage in the complexities of social change. She examines how higher education institutions can create a more supportive campus climate for students from diverse backgrounds, whether programs are equitably accessible and beneficial to all students, and how we can create structural conditions to support...

Steven G. Brint

SERU Principal Researcher; Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy, University of California, Riverside
Sociology and Public Policy, University of California, Riverside

Steven Brint is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside, Director of the Colleges & Universities 2000 Project, and a Principal Researcher in the SERU Consortium.

Brint is an organizational sociologist whose research focuses on topics in the sociology of higher education, the sociology of professions, and middle-class politics. His studies of higher education have been funded for two decades by the National Science Foundation and two philanthropies. He is the author of four books: The Diverted Dream (with Jerome Karabel) (...

Anne MacLachlan

Senior Research Associate and Visiting Scholars Coordinator, CSHE

Anne J. MacLachlan is a retired senior researcher at CSHE who continues to be devoted to increasing access, persistence, and success in postsecondary education for underrepresented groups (URM) including domestic minorities, women, and those from uneducated/poor families with an emphasis on those in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Her research areas cover the spectrum of postsecondary populations including community college and transfer students, undergraduates in general, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty. Among these, doctoral...

John Aubrey Douglass

Senior Research Fellow, CSHE

John Aubrey Douglass is Senior Research Fellow and Research Professor - Public Policy and Higher Education at the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) at the University of California - Berkeley. He is the author of Neo-Nationalism and Universities (Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press 2021), ...

Igor Chirikov

Senior Researcher and SERU Consortium Director

Igor Chirikov is the Director of the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium and Senior Researcher at CSHE. SERU Consortium is an academic and policy research collaboration based at Center for Studies in Higher Education at the UC Berkeley working in partnership with the University of Minnesota, the International Graduate Insight Group (i-graduate) and member universities. The Consortium is a group of leading research-intensive universities that increase student success by generating and analyzing comparative data on the student experience.

As SERU Consortium...

Aashish Mehta

Associate Professor, Global Studies, UC Santa Barbara

Aashish Mehta is a development economist who studies globalization and structural change, and how they influence the role of education in labor markets. He also studies the political-economy of public services provision, and the role of education in social stratification. His publications cover many other aspects of development policy, and appear in a wide variety of economics and public policy journals.

Born and raised in India, he trained in economics and energy policy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he completed his PhD in Agricultural and Applied Economics. Prior...

Laura Hamilton

Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of California-Merced

Laura Hamilton is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced, and co-founder of the Higher Education, Race, & the Economy (or HERE) Lab. Her award-winning books include: Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality, Parenting to a Degree: How Family Matters for College Women’s Success, and most recently Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities. Her work examines the ways in which postsecondary organizations and higher education funding structures work to create and maintain racial and class inequities.

Aray Saniyazova

SERU-International Research Associate

Aray Saniyazova is a SERU-International Research Associate. She holds a Master’s degree in education from Vanderbilt University (2011), and PhD in education from Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan (2017).

Her research interests focus on contemporary issues of higher education: transition from high school to university; student experience and college climate; gender issues in education; institutional development of newly established universities. She was involved in the collaborative research project of the Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education and the University of...

Rahul Choudaha

Senior Researcher - SERU Consortium

Dr. Rahul Choudaha is a Senior Researcher affiliated with the SERU Consortium. As a scholar-practitioner, Choudaha’s applied research focuses on mobility, experiences and enrollment of international students and its implications for internationalization and global engagement strategies. He has worked for nearly 15 years in global education services organizations and held cross-functional leadership roles including Executive Vice President at Studyportals and Chief Knowledge Officer at World Education Services. Choudaha...